Priorities for Mr. Lula as he becomes president include addressing the food insecurity that affects more than half of the Brazilian population, as well as the restoration of the economy and democratic normalcy after Mr. Bolonaro’s populist rule.
Brazil
Posted inDispatches, Politics & Society
Bolsonaro will accept Brazil’s election results only if he wins. The Catholic Church has to defend democracy.
South America’s largest democracy will hold presidential elections on Oct. 2 with two iconic Latin American populists as competing candidates: Mr. Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who served as president from 2003 until 2010.
Posted inFaith, News
Cardinal Hummes, close friend of Pope Francis, dies at 87
Cardinal Claudio Hummes was one of Brazil’s main religious leaders and a strong advocate for the poor.
Posted inFaith, News
Pope Francis reassures bishops that resigning ‘does not cross his mind’
“I want to live my mission as long as God allows me and that’s it,” Francis said when asked about his health by Brazilian bishops.
Posted inDispatches, Faith
Brazilian bishop: I hope the synod will end clericalism in the church
“It is clericalism that prevents the church today from being missionary,” Bishop Cipollini said. “I have great hope that the synod on synodality can make clericalism collapse—perhaps not entirely, but at least in its major strongholds.”
Posted inDispatches, Faith
Arizona priest who invalidly baptized thousands defended by former parishioners in Brazil
Members of one of his former communities said they doubt that he used incorrect formulas for sacraments while he worked there, and many of them recall him fondly as one of the most important priests in their lives.
Posted inDispatches, Politics & Society
A priest calls out violence against the poor and homeless in Brazil: ‘We have to move from hostility to hospitality’
The Rev. Júlio Lancellotti is São Paulo’s designated vicar for street people. He has been posting images of spikes and other elements of hostile architecture gathered from cell phone photos or video from all over Brazil.
Posted inDispatches, Politics & Society
‘Nobody flees from love’: Brazil’s alternative prisons offer a model of restorative justice
Criminals “are not dangerous people. They are only people who are not sufficiently loved.”
Posted inDispatches, Politics & Society
A Franciscan sister joins the fight for Indigenous rights in Brazil
In a region of vast distances, weak infrastructure and a relatively small number of priests, religious and laywomen like Sister Laura are the mainstay of Catholic spirituality.
Posted inDispatches, Faith
Brazil once depended on Europe for vocations. Now it sends women religious missionaries all over the world.
Besides taking up the challenge of exploring new frontiers of evangelization in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Brazilian women religious have also become evangelizers of the “old continent,” Europe, where female vocations have radically declined in recent decades.