Labor and Catholicism in Brazil during the Cold War: European Worker-Priests in Resistance to the Dictatorship, 1960s and 1970s with Larissa R. Corrêa

In the last years of the 1960s in Europe, students and workers known as the 1968 generation challenged moral institutions and the patriarchal and political system of the time, making new social demands. These movements also reverberated in Latin America, where the Catholic Church had enjoyed hegemony since the early times of European colonization in the sixteenth century. There was an intense revolutionary atmosphere among Latin American progressive and leftist sectors, while conservatives and moderate liberals were united to plot coups d’état, aligned with the US foreign policy of containing communism. Predictably, the Catholic Church was not oblivious to the course of global changes that marked the 1960s. Latin America was then a target for missionary work as the number of Catholics grew exponentially, becoming the region with the largest Catholic membership worldwide in the 1970s, followed by the African and Asian continents. These profound global and regional political transformations caused by the Cold War is the context in which I seek to understand the worker-priests’ movements in Brazil, which was marked by the presence of foreign priests mostly of French and Belgian origins. I am interested in analyzing the forms of clerical aggiornamento outlined during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and to investigate how these foreign priests arrived in Brazil, as well as their expectations, goals, aspirations, and challenges. Beyond approaching a Catholic mission as a typical instrument of church domination, I seek to point out the existence of an ongoing internationalist project, of religious character, aimed at uniting the Church and the working class in the fight for social justice, dignity, and better working conditions.

Larissa Rosa Corrêa is associate professor of History of Pontifical Catholic University of Rio (PUC-Rio), and a research fellow of the Brazilian Scientific Research Council (CNPq) and FAPERJ (JCN), Brazil. Her last book is “Anti-Communist Solidarity: US-Brazilian Labor Relations During the Dictatorship in Cold War Brazil (1964-1985)”. Berlin: The Guyter, 2022.