PSOL councilor against Father Antonio Vieira: religious man was not racist

Over his 89 years of life, Father Antonio Vieira produced more than 200 sermons, recited, among other cities, in Salvador (BA), São Luís (MA), Lisbon, Cape Verde and Rome. On different occasions, the religious man spoke out about slaves of African origin. At a historical moment when it was common to consider black people inferior, he declared that “each one is the color of his heart”. And he recalled that according to tradition, two of the three wise men who visited the newborn Jesus were black.

There are no signs of racism, therefore, in Vieira’s work. Even so, a municipal law approved by the Rio de Janeiro City Council authorizes the removal of images in honor of important historical figures.

“We will no longer accept the naturalization and, worse, the exaltation of figures who promoted racism and fascism throughout history and today have their crimes mitigated by the revisionism practiced by the extreme right”, declared the co-author of the bill, the councilor Mônica Benício, from the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL).

The first image to be submitted to the new law is a statue of the Jesuit religious Antonio Vieira. A gift from the Lisbon City Council, it was installed in 2011 in the garden of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ). It turns out that Vieira cannot be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, a slaveholder, a eugenicist or the author of racist acts or acts harmful to human rights.

Martyrdom rewarded

“Antonio Vieira was born in Lisbon, to poor people, in a modest house on Rua dos Cônegos, in the neighborhood of the Sé, on February 6, 1608”, writes Portuguese historian João Lúcio Azevedo in his biography Story of Antônio Vieira. At the age of six, the family left for Salvador (BA), which at the time was home, according to Azevedo, to “3 thousand Portuguese neighbors, 8 thousand Indians and 3 to 4 thousand African slaves”. Educated at the Jesuit school in the then capital of the colony, he was at first an average student, far from the renowned writer and speaker he would become.

He was a priest, missionary and politician. But would he have considered Africans inferior? The subject was the subject of some of his sermons. One of them, recited in 1633 to a brotherhood of black devotees of Our Lady of the Rosary, points to the sacrifices that slaves suffered. Vieira was just 19 years old and was two years away from being ordained a priest.

“The masters are few, and the slaves many; the masters breaking galas, the slaves undressed and naked; the masters feasting, the slaves starving; the masters swimming in gold and silver, the slaves loaded with iron; the masters treating them like brutes, the slaves worshiping and fearing them like gods; the masters standing pointing to the lash, like statues of pride and tyranny, the slaves prostrate with their hands tied behind them like vile images of servitude, and spectacles of extreme misery”.

In the speech, he asks: “Are these men not children of the same Adam and the same Eve? Were these souls not redeemed with the blood of the same Christ? Aren’t these bodies born and die, like ours? Don’t they breathe the same air? Doesn’t the same sky cover them? Doesn’t the same Sun warm them? What star is that that dominates them, so sad, so enemy, so cruel?”

He ends up calling on the slave audience to be patient, because their martyrdom would be rewarded with divine salvation. The same does not apply to the masters: “They are cruelly whipping the miserable slave, and he is shouting with each lash, Jesus, Mary, Jesus, Mary; without the reverence of these two names being enough to move a man who calls himself a Christian to piety. And how do you want these two names to be heard at the time of death, when you call them? But these cries that you do not hear, know that God hears them: and since they are of no value to your heart, they will undoubtedly have no remedy for your punishment.”

“Superb present”

Apart from Vieira’s own texts, does it make sense to look for signs of racism in any European born in the 17th century? “Nowadays, there is a tendency to judge the past in a primary and simplistic way. It is the pride of the present, which stands as a purifying judge of the past”, responds Portuguese historian José Eduardo Franco, director of the Center for Global Studies (CEG) at Universidade Aberta, based in Lisbon.

“Four hundred years ago, in Vieira’s time, the hierarchy of values ​​and its conceptual framework were diametrically opposed to those that structure our democratic societies today”, he continues. “What we need, above all, is the development of a critical culture to understand the figures of our past in their greatness and misery and in their greatness often mixed with misery, learning from their lessons to avoid repeating the same mistakes.”

In the specific case of the Jesuit, would it make sense to accuse the religious? “Although Vieira’s conceptual framework is different from ours, if we carefully read all of his work, what we often find are statements that today we can consider radically anti-racist”, says Franco, who is the editor of a book, Each one is the color of your heartwhich brings together the religious man’s writings on the subject.

“At the end of his life, Vieira, in a document entitled ‘Vote of the residents of São Paulo’, refuted those who wanted to revoke the laws protecting Amerindians decreed by the King of Portugal, persuaded by Vieira, defending the sovereignty and freedom of Amerindian nations . Among the arguments he presented, this courageous statement stands out: ‘in terms of the legitimacy of sovereignty, the golden crown of a European monarch was as valuable as the feather crown of an Amerindian king’”.

“A great diplomat”

The accusation against Vieira is not new – in fact, it tends to be widespread against any religious person who has been involved in missionary efforts in colonies occupied by European nations. In 2018, a group of undergraduate and postgraduate students attacked paintings that, for more than three decades, belonged to the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) collection and were displayed in the institution’s corridors. All the works made reference to the religious.

In 2020, a statue of the Jesuit, which had been inaugurated in Largo Trindade Coelho, in Lisbon, in 2017, was vandalized: the word “decoloniza” was painted in red.

The president of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who has been in office since 2016, reacted at the time, declaring that he never liked the idea of ​​“burning books or destroying statues”. He also stated: “As for Father António Vieira, what was done demonstrated not only ignorance, but also imbecility.”

Vieira, he recalled, “fought for independence, was a great diplomat, was a progressive man for that time, persecuted by the Portuguese colonists in Brazil, persecuted by the court, at one point, persecuted by the Inquisition”. And he added: “he was one of the greatest Portuguese writers, he was the greatest Portuguese orator. Therefore, for his time, this man, who was a visionary, being considered an example of what we want to destroy and demolish from memory, from testimony to our History, is an idiotic thing.”

At the same time, Aldo Rebelo, a left-wing politician, affiliated with the Democratic Labor Party (PDT), former president of the Chamber of Deputies and former minister of the Secretariat of Political Coordination and Institutional Relations, Defense, Science, Technology and Innovation and do Sport, wrote an article defending Vieira.

“Called by the poet Fernando Pessoa emperor of the Portuguese language, considered by many to be the most cultured man of his time, author of sermons renowned in Portuguese literature, preacher invited by the Pope to the convert to Catholicism Queen Cristina of Sweden, prisoner of the Inquisition, accused of ties with Judaism, expelled from Maranhão for defending the Indians against slavery, Vieira had his statue attacked by identity activists in Lisbon”.

He continues: “To attack the memory of Vieira is also to attack the memory of Brazil.” And he criticizes the militants of identitarianism who, in his opinion, lead these attacks. “Identitarianism is a current originating in the United States and which has been colonized with ideas and money is an important part of the progressive movement in Brazil and the world. Identitarianism needs to be contained and defeated in Brazil as a reactionary current that divides the people”.

When contacted by Gazeta do Povo to point out that other works could be removed under the new law, councilor Monica Benicio did not comment. But, according to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, a preliminary list includes a statue of Marshal Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, the Duke of Caxias, and General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, president of Brazil between 1964 and 1967.