‘Capacity for dialogue is lost,’ archbishop warns

The political crisis in Brazil, in which Congress has started impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff, has drawn dark warnings from church sources, write Francis McDonagh and Filipe Avillez. Extraordinary sessions of Congress are being held every Monday and Friday in an attempt to force a vote on impeachment by mid-April.

Meanwhile Ms Rousseff’s predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is accused of money laundering in the Petrobras corruption scandal. Last week saw the largest anti-government demonstrations ever seen in Brazil.

The Archbishop of Belo Horizonte, Dom Walmor Oliveira de Azevedo, denounced party politics for “creating chaos in society”.  “We have lost the capacity for a dialogue that will produce consensus and understanding,” he said.  “It is a situation of ‘everyone for themselves’ that crushes the common good like a tractor.”  The Brazilian Council of Christian Churches called on Brazilians not to let themselves be polarised by a “partisan and tendentious media” and to express their opinions peacefully.

Particular criticism has been directed at Judge Sérgio Moro, who sent armed police to bring ex-president Lula in for questioning, and later released recordings of a conversation between Ms Rousseff and Lula.

Frei Betto, the Dominican theologian who served in Lula’s government, accused Moro of abuse of authority, but suggested that his actions would reinvigorate the Workers’ Party (PT), to which Lula and Rousseff belong. Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff complained that the judicial system had focused almost exclusively on the misdeeds of the PT.