ARCHBISHOP Luciano Mendes de Almeida was a leading figure in the progressive wing of Brazil’s Roman Catholic Church during and after a long period of military rule in the 1970s and 1980s. He worked tirelessly to put “liberation theology” into practice, by dedicating himself to the poor and oppressed, and involving the Church actively in the lives and problems of ordinary people.
Dom Luciano, as he was invariably known, was born in 1930 and entered the Jesuit Order at the age of 17. He studied philosophy, and then theology in Rome, before his ordination in 1958. In 1976 he was the first Brazilian Jesuit to be appointed bishop, and was sent by Archbishop Paulo Evaristo Arns of São Paulo as auxiliary bishop of the working-class Belém district.
Mendes remained there until 1988, pouring his considerable energy into expanding pastoral work, setting up commissions to work with street children, the elderly and drug addicts, and encouraging the formation of grassroots church communities, which were the practical expression of the “preferential option for the poor” expounded by Latin American liberation theologians.
Dom Luciano was one of a group of socially conscious bishops, which included Archbishop Hélder Câmara, of Recife, who were a thorn in the side of Brazil’s military rulers, who had overthrown the left-wing President João Goulart in 1964 and remained in power until 1985.
Dom Luciano was elected general-secretary of the Brazilian bishops’ conference, CNBB, in 1979 and seven years later he became president, a post he held until 1994. In 1988 he was appointed Archbishop of Mariana, in Minas Gerais state, and remained there until his death. He was vice-president of the Latin American Council of Bishops, CELAM, 1995-98.
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At the CNBB, Dom Luciano did not just have a right-wing military dictatorship to contend with. Pope John Paul II became increasingly impatient with Latin American liberation theology and in 1985 ordered the influential Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff to stop teaching for a year, when his denunciations of capitalism became too much.
Dom Luciano never abandoned his commitment to the social role of the Church. A few months before his death he told a newspaper interviewer that “confronting the social injustice and inequality that afflict much of humanity” was among its most urgent priorities.
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Luciano Pedro Mendes de Almeida, Archbishop of Mariana, was born on October 5, 1930. He died on August 27, 2006, aged 75.