A Costaian Hermeneutic of Catholic Social Teaching: Critique, Retrieval, and Reconstruction

The preceding chapter argued that the Manifesto to the Nation contains more than a polemical rejection of Roman authority. Beneath Costa’s attacks upon papal monarchy, clerical privilege, ecclesiastical political power, private monopoly of land, and the Roman hierarchy’s relationship to fascism lies a constructive ecclesiology ordered around Christ, conciliarity, religious democracy, sacramental continuity, freedom of conscience, and material liberation. The Church, on this account, possesses no unconditional legitimacy simply by virtue of its institutional continuity. It remains accountable to Christ, and its authority, property relations, political alliances, sacramental structures, and treatment of workers and the poor must continually be judged according to whether they embody the Gospel they proclaim.

That constructive retrieval becomes especially important when approaching Costa’s brief but severe judgment upon three of the principal social encyclicals of modern Roman Catholicism. In Part 9 of the manifesto, Costa states that the dissemination of social justice required the shelving of Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Divini Redemptoris because, in his judgment, they were “all fascist documents”^[1]. The charge is striking, but Costa does not develop it systematically at that point. He does, however, provide a more specific argument several sections later. His criticism concerns especially the treatment of private property. Leo XIII, according to Costa, fails to distinguish property created through labor from private appropriation of land and natural resources, while Pius XI’s language concerning the social function of property leaves the problem fundamentally unresolved^[2]. The consequence, Costa argues, is an economic order in which natural goods that belong equally to humanity become monopolized by a minority, forcing others into dependence and wage slavery.^[3]

Costa’s accusation should therefore neither be accepted uncritically nor dismissed merely because Rerum Novarum predates historical fascism or because none of the three documents can simply be identified with fascist political doctrine. The more productive theological task is to ask what Costa is seeing when he uses the term. Within the manifesto, “fascism” names not only a particular political regime but a broader configuration of centralized authority, coercive hierarchy, economic privilege, alliance between ecclesiastical and political power, suppression of dissent, defense of capitalist property relations, and resistance to socialist transformation^[4]. His terminology is historically polemical, but the underlying criticism is sufficiently clear to permit a more disciplined theological analysis.

The task of this chapter is therefore not to determine simply whether the encyclicals are “fascist.^[5]” It is to develop and apply a Costaian hermeneutic capable of asking a more constructive question: what in these encyclicals would Costa reject because it reproduces relations of domination, what within them can nevertheless be retrieved as compatible with his Christological and social commitments, and what positive ecclesial and Christological possibilities emerge when those retrieved principles are reconstructed beyond the limitations of the documents themselves? The method proposed here proceeds through three movements: critique, retrieval, and reconstruction. These movements do not treat Costa as an infallible counter-authority to Rome. Costa himself remains subject to historical, theological, and Christological judgment. Rather, the encounter between Costa and the encyclicals becomes dialectical. The encyclicals expose weaknesses or incompleteness in Costa, Costa exposes contradictions within the encyclicals, and both remain accountable to a Christological criterion that exceeds them.

Critique, Retrieval, and Reconstruction

The first movement is critique. Costa’s criticism of Rome consistently begins from the recognition of contradiction. The Church proclaims Christ but may organize itself through domination. It preaches mercy while using excommunication as a form of coercion. It speaks of fraternity while concentrating power in a single ecclesiastical office. It teaches freedom while attempting to master conscience. It proclaims the Creator while defending private monopoly over creation. For Costa, these contradictions are not secondary failures occurring outside ecclesiology. They concern the credibility of the Church as Church.

The governing criterion of critique is therefore Christological. Costa places the condemnatory practices of ecclesiastical authority beside Christ’s denunciations of hypocrisy, violence, selfishness, and neglect of “justice and mercy and honesty”^[6].Later, he describes the ICAB as a movement intended to “centralize the person of Christ” and to restore the Church of Christ in its purity^[7]. Christ is the standard by which the institution is judged. No papal document can therefore authenticate itself merely by being papal. Its social teaching must be judged according to whether the relations it protects, condemns, or proposes correspond to the Christ it claims to serve.

Critique also requires material verification. Costa refuses to treat freedom as meaningful when persons lack the economic means necessary to exercise it. Political rights become fictitious where the conditions of life are monopolized by others. The right to life implies the right to work, and the right to work implies access to those natural resources without which work cannot occur^[8]. A social teaching may therefore speak persuasively about dignity while preserving material relations that prevent people from acting as free subjects. Costa’s question is not merely whether workers are treated humanely. It is whether they possess the material capacity to participate in determining the conditions under which they live and labor.

The second movement is retrieval. Costa’s polemical language should not obscure the fact that his theology repeatedly retrieves what he believes to be authentic within traditions he otherwise criticizes. He rejects papal monarchy without rejecting episcopacy. He rejects clerical privilege without abandoning ordination. He opposes juridical centralization while retaining catholic communion. He attacks private monopoly of land while strongly defending personal ownership of what labor produces^[9]. His method is therefore not simple negation.

The same principle should govern the reading of the three encyclicals. Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Divini Redemptoris contain genuine criticisms of economic domination, exploitation, concentrated wealth, inadequate wages, liberal individualism, and the abandonment of workers. A Costaian reading should not discard these elements merely because their larger political and ecclesial frameworks remain objectionable to him. Retrieval asks what within a compromised structure can be turned against that structure’s own limitations.

Reconstruction completes the hermeneutic. Retrieved principles must be placed within an ecclesial and social order capable of realizing them more consistently. A defense of worker dignity must become worker participation. A critique of concentrated power must become a critique of concentrated ecclesiastical power as well. Subsidiarity must be applied not only to civil society but to dioceses and local churches. The social destination of property must become a material guarantee that creation is not monopolized by a minority. Christian concern for the poor must move beyond paternal protection toward the constitution of the poor and workers as subjects of theology, governance, and mission.

Critique, retrieval, and reconstruction therefore form a single movement. Critique identifies the contradiction between proclamation and domination; retrieval preserves what remains evangelical within the compromised tradition; reconstruction asks what ecclesial and material form the retrieved truth must assume if it is to embody Christ.

The Shared Social Diagnosis: Poverty, Exploitation, and the Failure of Liberalism

The first point of significant convergence between Costa and the three encyclicals is their rejection of the claim that existing economic relations are morally self-justifying. The documents differ sharply concerning property, socialism, hierarchy, and social authority, but none simply blesses unrestricted capitalism.

Rerum Novarum begins from a severe description of industrial society. Leo XIII speaks of the “utter poverty of the masses,” workers abandoned to the “hardheartedness of employers,” the “greed of unchecked competition,” rapacious usury, and a concentration of labor and trade that permits a small wealthy class to impose upon workers a yoke “little better than that of slavery itself”^[10]. The document further rejects the idea that contractual consent by itself establishes justice. A worker who accepts inadequate wages because necessity leaves no genuine alternative remains the victim of “force and injustice”^[11]. This is one of the encyclical’s most important insights. Formal agreement does not necessarily indicate substantive freedom.

Quadragesimo Anno develops the diagnosis further. By 1931, the problem is no longer represented only as cruelty by individual employers. Pius XI describes the concentration of economic power itself. Free competition has, in his account, tended toward its own destruction, producing economic domination in which enormous power is concentrated among relatively few persons controlling capital and credit^[12]. The encyclical’s language of “economic dictatorship” is considerably more structural than the paternal economic language often associated with Catholic social teaching. It recognizes that markets can generate power relations that cease to resemble meaningful freedom at all.

Even Divini Redemptoris, despite its principal purpose of condemning atheistic communism, acknowledges that communist appeal cannot be explained without reference to actual misery. Pius XI admits an “unequal distribution of the goods of this world” and “very real abuses chargeable to the liberalistic economic order”^[13]. He criticizes Catholic employers who treated property as a weapon by which workers were deprived of just wages and social rights^[14]. The document therefore knows that anti-communist denunciation does not remove the social realities to which communism responds.

Costa could retrieve all of this. His manifesto similarly refuses the fiction that existing economic relations result simply from free individual exchange. The person deprived of access to land must rent the conditions of life from another, becoming dependent upon those who monopolize natural resources. Wage slavery, in Costa’s account, is not primarily the consequence of an unusually immoral employer. It arises from the prior structure of dispossession^[15]. The encyclicals and Costa therefore share an important premise: economic freedom cannot be reduced to juridical permission or contractual form.

The difference appears in what follows from that premise. The papal documents generally seek to morally discipline relations between classes while maintaining private property and a differentiated social order. Costa asks whether those relations themselves must be transformed.

Property, Creation, and the Limits of Catholic Social Reform

The most direct Costaian criticism concerns property. Rerum Novarum insists that private property is a natural right and treats its inviolability as the first principle from which the social question must be addressed^[16]. Leo argues that labor transforms nature and thereby creates a legitimate claim over what has been improved. Yet he moves from the legitimate ownership of labor’s product to ownership of the underlying land itself. The worker who saves wages and purchases land is said to possess that land as another form of accumulated labor^[17].

Costa’s objection is precise. He agrees that labor creates a moral claim. Indeed, he states more absolutely than the encyclical that the products of labor belong to the producer^[18]. What he rejects is the fusion of two distinct objects under the single term “property.” The thing produced by human labor and the natural condition upon which labor acts do not have the same origin. Land, water, minerals, and natural resources are not manufactured by their legal owners. They belong to creation before they become commodities^[19].

From Costa’s standpoint, therefore, Rerum Novarum reaches a true premise and then extends it too far. Labor creates entitlement to its fruits; it does not follow that labor creates an unlimited right to exclude others from what labor did not create. Costa explicitly identifies this as “the confusion of Leo XIII”^[20].

Quadragesimo Anno develops the Roman position by emphasizing that property has both an individual and a social character^[21]. This can be retrieved. It prevents ownership from becoming morally absolute and recognizes that the use of property is accountable to the common good. Yet Costa finds the language of the “social function of property” insufficient because it leaves ownership conceptually undifferentiated. If land itself remains privately monopolizable, requiring owners only to exercise their possession socially, then the underlying relation of exclusion continues^[22].

The three documents therefore reveal a shared tension. They recognize that ownership imposes obligations, but Costa asks whether obligation is sufficient where the form of ownership itself creates dependence. Divini Redemptoris maintains private property while condemning its abusive use, again distinguishing morally responsible ownership from exploitation^[23]. Costa would retrieve the criticism of property used as an instrument of domination but press it further. The problem is not merely that an owner may misuse legitimate power. Some forms of exclusive power may themselves be illegitimate because they give one person control over another’s access to the means of life.

The reconstructed principle is therefore neither unrestricted capitalism nor an undifferentiated abolition of personal property. Costa’s own proposal distinguishes common ownership of natural resources from personal ownership of improvements and products created through labor^[24]. A Costaian social theology thus holds together two claims: the worker should not be dispossessed of what labor produces, and no individual should possess a power of exclusion over creation sufficient to make another person’s access to life dependent upon permission.

Class Harmony, Moral Reform, and the Problem of Structural Conflict

A second shared theme concerns class conflict. The three encyclicals recognize profound inequality but resist treating class struggle as the means through which that inequality should be overcome.

Rerum Novarum argues that capital and labor are mutually dependent and that class hostility is contrary to the proper order of society. The rich and the worker should live in harmony because “capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital”^[25]. Employers possess duties toward workers, workers possess duties toward employers, and Christian religion is presented as the most effective means of reconciling them^[26]. Yet the encyclical’s own diagnosis complicates this harmony. If workers have been reduced to conditions resembling slavery, if bargaining can occur under the pressure of necessity, and if ownership and economic power are concentrated among a minority, then the two classes do not encounter one another from equivalent positions.

Quadragesimo Anno recognizes the structural difficulty more clearly but still seeks to overcome class conflict through organized cooperation among occupational groups. Its reconstruction of society through industries and professions is intended to replace antagonistic class organization with corporative bodies directed toward the common good^[27]. Pius XI is not merely demanding individual kindness. He proposes institutional reorganization. Yet the desired outcome remains the containment and transcendence of class struggle rather than the empowerment of workers as an autonomous class capable of challenging ownership relations.

Divini Redemptoris intensifies the rejection by associating class struggle with the violent^[28] logic of communist materialism^[29]. The document acknowledges injustice but refuses revolutionary agency as an acceptable response. Its alternative remains class collaboration, Catholic social organization, just wages, charity, and moral regeneration^[30].

Costa’s criticism would not require a romanticization of conflict or violence. His own social vision culminates in peace, fraternity, equality, and the Kingdom of God^[31][32]. Nevertheless, he would resist language of harmony that treats conflict principally as a moral failure between people when the conditions of conflict arise from unequal possession of social power. Where workers depend upon owners for access to land, employment, housing, and survival, class antagonism cannot simply be preached away.

The retrieval here is the encyclicals’ refusal to make hatred an ethical ideal. Costa’s own Christological criterion provides no basis for celebrating domination merely because it comes from below. Yet reconstruction requires distinguishing reconciliation from pacification. Christian reconciliation becomes credible only when the structures producing the antagonism are transformed. Otherwise, the language of harmony can demand that the subordinate party accept an unequal peace.

A Costaian ecclesiology applies the same principle internally. Ecclesial unity cannot mean the silencing of conflict through submission to a superior office. Costa’s historical appeal to councils, autonomous churches, episcopal equality, and “true religious democracy” assumes that communion can sustain difference without reducing difference to disobedience^[33]. Social peace and ecclesial unity share the same requirement: neither can be authentic when achieved through the suppression of those who possess less power.

The Church as Social Arbiter and the Question of Ecclesial Authority

The strongest common ecclesiological tension across the three encyclicals concerns the Church’s understanding of its own authority.

Rerum Novarum declares that no satisfactory solution to the social question can be reached without religion and the Church, and it presents the Church as possessing the Gospel teaching capable of reconciling classes and directing social morality^[34]. Quadragesimo Anno develops the claim explicitly, asserting the Church’s right and duty to pronounce with supreme authority upon moral questions implicated in social and economic life^[35]. Divini Redemptoris presents the Apostolic See as the “Teacher of Truth” and contrasts Catholic social doctrine with communist falsehood^[36]. Across the three documents, the Church is not merely one participant in social discernment. It repeatedly appears as the authoritative interpreter capable of determining the proper limits of social alternatives.

Costa would regard this claim with suspicion because it mirrors the ecclesiological structure he rejects. His criticism of papal monarchy is not simply jurisdictional. The deeper problem is an office identifying its own judgment too closely with the judgment of Christ. Costa appeals instead to the united episcopate, local autonomy, councils, and participation of clergy and laity^[37]. An institution that presents itself as the decisive mediator of social truth while remaining internally monarchical risks reproducing in its doctrine the same concentration of authority Costa opposes in its polity.

Retrieval nevertheless remains possible. The encyclicals are correct to deny that economic life exists outside moral judgment. Costa himself goes further than liberalism by insisting that land, labor, wages, ownership, and deprivation are theological matters. He would therefore reject any reading of Church-state separation that confines Christianity to private spirituality. His “free Church for a free State” is not an apolitical Church^[38]. It is a Church freed from domination so that it may speak and act without becoming an apparatus of coercive rule.

The reconstructed principle is therefore not ecclesial silence but non-monopolistic theological authority. The Church may judge economic arrangements in light of Christ, but the Church must simultaneously place its own economic and institutional arrangements under the same judgment. It cannot proclaim decentralization while practicing ecclesial centralization, condemn economic monopoly while sustaining monopolistic authority, or defend worker participation while denying meaningful participation to its own laity.

Workers: Protected Objects or Ecclesial Subjects

All three encyclicals contain substantial concern for workers. Yet their recurring weakness from a Costaian perspective is that workers are more often protected, instructed, organized, or represented than constituted as agents capable of determining ecclesial and social life.

Rerum Novarum strongly defends associations and recognizes the natural right of workers to form them^[39]. This is genuinely retrievable. Yet the document prefers associations formed under explicitly Christian moral and ecclesiastical guidance, and it treats revolutionary or non-Christian organization with suspicion. The worker becomes active, but within boundaries established by a hierarchy that determines the legitimate purposes of that activity.

Quadragesimo Anno similarly celebrates worker associations while integrating them into a broader corporative order. It seeks participation without permitting class conflict to remain politically decisive^[40]. Divini Redemptoris goes further in mobilizing priests, Catholic Action, associations, employers, and governments against communism^[41]. Workers are again a central object of pastoral concern, but their autonomous political organization outside Catholic direction is treated as dangerous.

Costa’s religious democracy produces a different trajectory. If clergy and laity participate in choosing bishops, priests, and deacons, and if the community participates in councils, then the Church cannot be divided into an authoritative clerical subject and a passive lay object^[42]. When this principle is read together with Costa’s economic argument, worker subjecthood becomes ecclesiologically necessary.

A person cannot meaningfully participate if material conditions make participation impossible. The worker who lacks security, education, time, institutional access, or freedom from employer retaliation may possess a formal right without possessing practical agency. Costa’s material account of freedom therefore radicalizes his religious democracy. Participation must be made materially possible.

The resulting ecclesiology does not treat workers as an ecclesial constituency whose needs experts interpret for them. Workers, tenants, the unemployed, migrants, and dispossessed communities become participants in the Church’s determination of what justice requires. The encyclicals’ protection of workers can thus be retrieved, but reconstruction moves from protection to participation, from benevolence to agency, and from pastoral object to ecclesial subject.

Rerum Novarum: Naturalized Inequality, Patriarchy, and the Theology of Endurance

Some elements of Rerum Novarum are distinctive and require criticism beyond the themes shared by all three documents. Most important is its tendency to treat certain forms of inequality and social hierarchy as natural.

Leo XIII argues that differences of capacity, strength, and circumstance inevitably produce unequal conditions and that attempts to abolish inequality entirely struggle against nature^[43]. The point, in its most defensible form, is unobjectionable: human beings possess different abilities, interests, needs, and circumstances. Yet the argument risks moving too quickly from human difference to social inequality. Existing differences in property, class location, and power can then appear as extensions of nature rather than historically produced relations.

Costa’s manifesto moves in the opposite direction. He distinguishes natural inequality of circumstance from institutional denial of equal rights. His economic argument begins precisely from equal rights to life, work, and use of natural resources^[44]. Difference need not imply domination.

The same difficulty appears in Rerum Novarum’s account of the family. The family is governed by paternal authority, and the text goes so far as to describe the child as belonging to the father^[45]. The previous analysis correctly identifies this as one of the document’s most strongly hierarchical formulations. Costa does not develop a systematic theology of gender or family capable of resolving this problem, and his own assumptions should not simply be presumed egalitarian. Nevertheless, the participatory logic of his ecclesiology provides a principle against treating authority as possession. No human person becomes another person’s property by entering a relationship of dependence.

A related problem appears in the encyclical’s theology of suffering. Leo warns against promises to eliminate all suffering from human life and associates hardship with the fallen condition of humanity^[46]. The theological claim that suffering cannot be eliminated from creaturely existence need not be rejected. Yet it becomes dangerous when the unavoidable suffering of finitude is insufficiently distinguished from preventable suffering produced by social arrangements.

Costa’s material hermeneutic demands that distinction. Death, vulnerability, grief, and creaturely limitation are not equivalent to starvation wages, landlord monopoly, dispossession, or political repression. Christianity may teach endurance before what cannot be overcome without thereby converting historically produced injustice into a spiritual exercise.

Quadragesimo Anno: Corporatism, Subsidiarity, and Economic Dictatorship

Quadragesimo Anno presents the most internally complex encounter with Costa because some of its strongest principles can be turned against its own hierarchical tendencies.

Its diagnosis of concentrated capital is a major point of retrieval. Pius XI sees that economic power can become political power and that domination may arise not simply from individual vice but from the organization of the economy itself^[47]. Costa can readily appropriate that diagnosis. Monopoly, for Costa, is precisely the mechanism by which equal access to the conditions of life is denied^[48].

The difficulty lies in the proposed alternative. Quadragesimo Anno seeks to reconstruct social order through occupational or professional bodies that overcome class conflict and coordinate competing interests^[49]. The encyclical discusses a contemporary corporative arrangement involving legally recognized syndicates and prohibitions upon strikes and lockouts, while maintaining reservations about excessive state control^[50]. The document therefore cannot simply be called fascist in a strict historical sense; indeed, decentralization and its opposition to excessive concentration can work against totalitarian absorption. The earlier analysis properly characterizes it as deeply ambivalent: structurally perceptive yet politically disciplinary.

Costa would nevertheless recognize a danger. A corporative structure can claim to reconcile classes while actually institutionalizing their existing inequality. If workers and owners enter the corporate body from radically unequal positions, formal representation does not necessarily produce democratic power.

Yet Quadragesimo Anno also provides one of the richest principles available for Costaian retrieval: decentralization. The claim that larger organizations should not absorb functions that smaller associations can perform^[51] bears an obvious structural resemblance to Costa’s communion of autonomous dioceses. The principle can be reconstructed ecclesiologically. If the state should not usurp the proper agency of smaller communities, neither should a universal ecclesiastical center absorb the legitimate authority of dioceses, clergy, and laity.

Read through Costa, decentralization becomes more than administrative decentralization. It becomes a theological protection of ecclesial subjecthood. Local churches possess genuine agency, wider councils coordinate rather than annihilate that agency, and catholicity is produced through communion rather than subordination.

Divini Redemptoris: Atheistic Communism, Ideological Closure, and Christian Communism

Divini Redemptoris presents the sharpest ideological conflict. It describes Bolshevik and atheistic communism as a rival account of salvation grounded in materialism, rejection of God, class struggle, abolition of private property, suppression of religion, and subordination of the person to the collectivity^[52]. Pius XI eventually declares communism “intrinsically wrong” and prohibits collaboration with it “in any undertaking whatsoever”^[53].

Costa need not reject every element of this criticism. His own social theology is explicitly theistic and Christological. Creation originates in God; natural resources belong to humanity precisely because they are divine gifts; and his social vision culminates in Christianity and the Kingdom of God^[54]. A materialism that denies God, reduces persons to instruments of production, or makes political violence morally absolute would therefore contradict Costa’s stated principles.

The point of conflict is the encyclical’s tendency to make atheistic Bolshevism representative of communism as such. Divini Redemptoris compresses communism into materialism, terror, propaganda, anti-religion, and civilizational destruction while giving comparatively little space to the diversity of socialist and communist traditions. This is particularly important because Costa himself uses explicitly communist language. His dioceses are to live in evangelical fraternity as one body in “true Christian communism”^[55].

Costa therefore requires a distinction that Divini Redemptoris largely refuses: atheistic communism is not identical with every form of common ownership, socialist economic organization, worker collectivism, or Christian communism.

His own communism is not grounded in the metaphysical primacy of matter. It is grounded in creation, Christ, fraternity, equal freedom, and the common destination of what God has not given exclusively to any individual. Nor does Costa simply abolish personal possession. He protects the fruits of labor while denying that creation itself can be monopolized^[56].

The constructive response to Divini Redemptoris is therefore not that Christianity should accept anything calling itself communist. Costa’s own Christological rule prevents such surrender. Political ideology remains accountable to Christ just as ecclesiastical authority does. But the encyclical’s binary opposition between Christian civilization and communism cannot determine in advance which economic forms Christianity may inhabit.

Its strongest internal concession points beyond that opposition. Pius XI admits that communism finds adherents partly because liberal capitalism has produced real misery and because Catholic employers themselves have committed grave injustice^[57]. Costa would press that admission further. If the social conditions condemned by communists are real, then opposition to communism cannot become a theological permission to preserve those conditions.

Christological Reconstruction

The encounter with the three encyclicals ultimately returns to Christology. Costa does not provide a systematic Christological treatise in the manifesto, but he does provide a practical Christological rule sufficiently coherent to organize his social and ecclesial thought.

First, Christ is the criterion by which the Church is judged. Costa’s appeal to the Sermon on the Mount and Christ’s denunciation of religious hypocrisy places justice, mercy, and honesty over ecclesiastical self-protection^[58]. Christ therefore cannot function merely as the divine guarantor of an already established Church. The institution itself must remain answerable to him.

Second, Costa’s Christology is incarnational in its social consequence. He places the Johannine confession of the Word made flesh at the center of his reconstructed Church^[59]. The Word enters material history. A Church centered upon the incarnate Christ cannot finally treat bodies, work, food, shelter, land, and material freedom as matters external to ecclesiology. Material life is not the opposite of spiritual life. It is one of the places in which fidelity to Christ becomes visible.

Third, Costa’s Christ is not a legitimator of domination. The contrast in his manifesto is decisive: Christ responds mercifully to those marked by weakness and sin, while directing his harshest condemnation against religious hypocrisy, violence, selfishness, and neglect of justice^[60]. Christological authority therefore takes the form of accountable service rather than possession of others.

Fourth, Christ relativizes every political economy. Capitalism cannot identify private ownership with Christian order simply because the Church has historically defended property. Socialism cannot identify itself automatically with the Kingdom because it promises equality. Communism cannot become an unquestioned absolute because it criticizes exploitation. Costa’s own proposal remains reformable because Christ, rather than any economic mechanism, is the final criterion.

The positive Christology that emerges is therefore neither merely devotional nor reducible to political ideology. It is a practical Christology of judgment, incarnation, mercy, freedom, fraternity, and material liberation. Christ judges institutions by what they make possible for concrete persons, especially those placed under relations of domination.

Constructing the Church Through Critique, Retrieval, and Reconstruction

The ecclesiology that follows from this Christology is consequently more radical than a revised social ethic.

The three encyclicals repeatedly ask how the Church should teach society. Costa forces a prior question: what must the Church become if it is to teach society credibly?

A Church that condemns concentrated economic power cannot organize itself through concentrated ecclesiastical power. A Church that defends associations cannot deny its own members meaningful participation. A Church that teaches decentralization cannot reduce local churches to administrative extensions of a distant center. A Church that condemns exploitation cannot permit its own property and employment practices to reproduce exploitative relations. A Church that advocates justice for workers cannot leave workers as passive recipients of clerical interpretation. And a Church that proclaims freedom cannot master conscience through coercion.

The reconstructed Church is therefore episcopal but non-monarchical; sacramental but resistant to clerical privilege; conciliar but not merely consultative; locally rooted without becoming congregationally isolated; socially engaged without becoming an organ of the state or party; committed to personal freedom without confusing freedom with economic individualism; and materially accountable to those whose lives disclose the consequences of economic arrangements.

Its understanding of property follows Costa’s distinction between labor and creation. Its understanding of participation follows his religious democracy. Its understanding of catholicity follows his communion of autonomous churches. Its understanding of authority follows the Christological subordination of institution to Gospel. Its understanding of the poor follows from the recognition that freedom without material capacity is fictitious. And its understanding of communism remains Christologically discriminating: common life, shared creation, and economic solidarity can be genuinely Christian without requiring atheistic materialism or political authoritarianism.

In the final analysis, the confrontation with Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Divini Redemptoris does not simply confirm Costa’s demand that the documents be shelved. It reveals something more constructive. Each encyclical contains truths that Costa’s own ecclesiology needs: the dignity of labor, the injustice of exploitative wages, the moral limits of contract, the right of association, the social obligations of property, the danger of concentrated economic power, subsidiarity, the responsibility of public authority, and the refusal to reduce human persons to economic instruments^[61]. The Costaian hermeneutic does not discard these principles. It asks whether they can be freed from the hierarchical, paternal, anti-socialist, and property-preserving limits within which the documents frequently place them.

Critique therefore becomes retrieval, and retrieval becomes reconstruction.

What emerges is a Church that cannot proclaim liberation externally while reproducing domination internally. It cannot defend the worker while denying the worker ecclesial agency. It cannot defend creation while allowing creation to become an instrument through which some possess power over the lives of others. It cannot condemn political totalitarianism while treating ecclesiastical authority as immune from participation and correction. Nor can it invoke Christ to defend a social order without allowing Christ to judge that order.

Costa’s deepest contribution is consequently not the claim that three papal encyclicals are fascist. That accusation remains historically contestable and, taken without qualification, insufficient. His deeper contribution is the theological principle beneath the accusation: the Church becomes unfaithful whenever institutional power, political alliance, or economic interest becomes more determinative of its social teaching than Christ and the material liberation of persons.

A reconstructed Costaian ecclesiology therefore asks not simply whether the Church possesses the correct doctrine of social justice, but whether its own common life makes justice materially present. Christ remains the center precisely because no ecclesiastical structure, property regime, political ideology, or economic program can take his place. The Church anticipates the Kingdom not by possessing it but by becoming, provisionally and imperfectly, a community in which authority is accountable, conscience is free, creation is held for the good of all, labor is not subordinated to domination, sacramental ministry serves rather than rules, and workers and the poor participate as subjects in the discernment of the Gospel.

Such a Church does not merely preach justice to society. It subjects itself to the same judgment. And in doing so, Costa’s critique of Catholic social teaching becomes something more than rejection: it becomes the basis for reconstructing an ecclesiology in which the Church’s proclamation of Christ is credible because liberation is not only spoken, but embodied in the relations through which the Church itself lives.

^[1] Appendix I, Part 9

^[2] Appendix I, Parts 20–23

^[3] Appendix I, Parts 19–22

^[4] Appendix I, Parts 6–9, 13–16

^[5] I believe it is important for the reader to note that history has vindicated much of Costa’s accusations of fascism, especially regarding Pope Pius XII. While a detailed analysis of this is outside the scope of this chapter, a detailed account can be found in David I. Kertzer’s book, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

^[6] Appendix I, Part 5

^[7] Appendix I, Part 25

^[8] Appendix I, Parts 17–19

^[9] Appendix I, Parts 1–4, 20–25

^[10] Rerum Novarum, 1, 3

^[11] Rerum Novarum, 45

^[12] Quadragesimo Anno, 105–109

^[13] Divini Redemptoris, 8, 15

^[14] Divini Redemptoris, 50

^[15] Appendix I, Part 19

^[16] Rerum Novarum, 6–15

^[17] Rerum Novarum, 5–10

^[18] Appendix I, Part 20

^[19] Appendix I, Part 21

^[20] Appendix I, Part 22

^[21] Quadragesimo Anno, 45–49

^[22] Appendix I, Parts 22–23

^[23] Divini Redemptoris, 27, 50–52

^[24] Appendix I, Parts 20–24

^[25] Rerum Novarum, 19

^[26] Rerum Novarum, 19–20

^[27] Quadragesimo Anno, 81–95

^[28] Note: Violent is used by Pius XI to describe communist materialism, but he does not use it to describe the systemic violence of the death-dealing dehumanization that is a natural result of the class disparity.

^[29] Divini Redemptoris, 9–14

^[30] Divini Redemptoris, 49–59

^[31] Appendix I, Part 24

^[32] While this is true of the Manifesto, it is important to note that during the Constitutionalist Revolt of 1932, a brief civil war within Brazil, he did create and arm a battalion known as “The Terror of Botucatu” to possibly confront the government forces. However, their role in the conflict was ultimately insignificant. See: Jarvis, p.22

^[33] Appendix I, Parts 2–4

^[34] Rerum Novarum, 16

^[35] Quadragesimo Anno, 41

^[36] Divini Redemptoris, 4–7, 25

^[37] Appendix I, Parts 1–4

^[38] Appendix I, Part 27

^[39] Rerum Novarum, 49–58

^[40] Quadragesimo Anno, 34-38, 81-95

^[41] Divini Redemptoris, 61–79

^[42] Appendix I, Part 3

^[43] Rerum Novarum, 17

^[44] Appendix I, Parts 17–19

^[45] Rerum Novarum, 13–14

^[46] Rerum Novarum, 17–18

^[47] Quadragesimo Anno, 105–109

^[48] Appendix I , Parts 19, 24

^[49] Quadragesimo Anno, 81–95

^[50] Quadragesimo Anno, 91–95

^[51] Quadragesimo Anno, 79–80

^[52] Divini Redemptoris, 7–14

^[53] Divini Redemptoris, 58

^[54] Appendix I, Parts 21, 24–25

^[55] Appendix I, Part 25

^[56] Appendix I, Parts 20–24

^[57] Divini Redemptoris, 15–16, 50

^[58] Appendix I, Part 5

^[59] Appendix I Part 25

^[60] Appendix I, Part 5

^[61] Rerum Novarum, 3, 37, 45, 49–58; Quadragesimo Anno, 45–49, 79–80, 105–109; Divini Redemptoris, 27–35, 49–55

CONSTRUCTING A POSITIVE COSTAIAN ECCLESIOLOGY: CHRIST, PARTICIPATION, AND MATERIAL LIBERATION

The preceding introduction argued that Carlos Duarte Costa should not be read only through the history of his conflict with Rome, his excommunication, or the institutional emergence of the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church. Those events explain the occasion of the Manifesto to the Nation, but they do not exhaust its theological meaning. The task now is to move from historical location to constructive retrieval. If Costa’s polemics are read alongside his proposals concerning Christ, episcopal authority, communal election, conscience, labor, land, property, and the social order, a positive ecclesiology begins to emerge. This chapter therefore asks not primarily what Costa rejected, but what kind of Church his manifesto makes possible. It approaches that question from an Independent Catholic and liberation-theological perspective, and, more specifically, from a religious-communist commitment to material justice, ecclesial participation, and the transformation of oppressive social relations. The argument is that Costa’s ecclesiology is coherent insofar as its disparate claims are ordered by a practical Christological rule: the Church is never its own final measure. Christ and the Gospel judge the Church, and ecclesial structures are credible only to the degree that they embody the freedom, fraternity, justice, and common life that they proclaim^[1].

Christ as the Criterion of Ecclesial Legitimacy

The deepest organizing principle in Costa’s manifesto is Christological. Near the conclusion of the document, he describes the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church as a movement that aims to “centralize the person of Christ” and to re-establish the Church of Christ in its purity^[2]. This language provides the norm by which the rest of the ecclesial program can be interpreted. Costa does not treat institutional continuity, juridical authority, or historical prestige as self-authenticating. The Church is authentic only insofar as its structures, ministries, and social commitments correspond to Christ.

This principle is already visible in Costa’s appeal to the Sermon on the Mount when discussing excommunication. He contrasts ecclesiastical condemnation with Christ’s mercy toward sinners and with Christ’s denunciation of religious hypocrisy, violence, selfishness, and neglect of justice^[3]. The ecclesiological consequences are significant. Ecclesial authority cannot simply identify its own judgment with God’s judgment. The institution itself remains accountable to the Gospel. Where ecclesiastical power becomes coercive, self-protective, economically interested, or socially dominant, fidelity to Christ may require reforming the institution rather than submitting to it.

Costa develops the same logic in his call to restore the Church of the first centuries. He distinguishes the evangelical principles of Christianity from the historical deformation of those principles through human passions and institutional absolutism^[4]. His retrieval of the early Church is historically debatable in some respects, but, constructively, it functions as a theological protest against the idea that whatever the Church has become must therefore be what Christ intended. Tradition, in this sense, is not mere repetition. It is a resource for judging later forms of ecclesial power.

For a liberation ecclesiology, this Christological criterion also demands material verification. A Church cannot proclaim a Christ who identifies divine judgment with justice and mercy while organizing itself through domination or while lending religious legitimacy to conditions that leave workers and the poor without the means of meaningful freedom. Costa’s Christocentrism therefore becomes a principle of institutional conversion: every ecclesial structure must remain reformable because none is identical with Christ^[5].

Episcopal and Apostolic, but Non-Monarchical

Costa’s rejection of centralized papal monarchy does not amount to a rejection of episcopacy. His constructive vision remains recognizably catholic in its commitment to bishops, priests, deacons, dioceses, apostolic succession, and sacramental ordination. What changes is the form in which authority is distributed.

Costa presents the Bishop of Rome as a bishop among bishops rather than as the absolute ruler of the universal Church^[6]. He further describes the ancient churches as autonomous communities bound together through peace, mutual fraternity, hospitality, and a common apostolic identity^[7]. The ecclesiology that follows from these claims is neither congregational individualism nor centralized monarchy. It is a communion of local churches. Catholicity is constituted through relation rather than subordination.

This becomes clearer in Costa’s appeal to conciliar government. He argues that the government of the Church rests in the united episcopate and that no bishop should constitute himself as a “bishop of bishops” exercising tyrannical control over others^[8]. Whatever judgment one makes about his historical use of Cyprian and the ancient councils, the constructive principle is coherent: authority belongs within communion and must be exercised collegially.

This principle, in turn, becomes a concrete institutional proposal. Each diocese is governed by a diocesan bishop; bishops are autonomous in local matters; matters affecting a state are addressed by bishops gathered in council; and matters affecting the nation are addressed by the national episcopate in council^[9]. The local church therefore possesses genuine agency, while wider catholicity is expressed through consultation and conciliar action. An Independent Catholic ecclesiology can retrieve this as a form of catholic communion without juridical monarchy: local churches are neither isolated congregations nor administrative branches of a distant center.

At the same time, the bishop is not sovereign over the local community. Costa explicitly places episcopal office within a process of communal election and confirmation. Episcopal ministry is sacramental and apostolic, but it is also received through the participation of the ecclesial body^[10]. This prevents Independent Catholicism from merely replacing papal monarchy with diocesan autocracy. If power is genuinely ecclesial, it must be accountable both horizontally to the wider episcopate and locally to the community from which ministry arises.

Conciliarity, Religious Democracy, and the Ecclesial Subject

Costa’s language of “true religious democracy” is one of the manifesto’s strongest constructive resources. He describes clergy and laity as participating in the election of bishops, priests, and deacons and as sharing in the assemblies of councils^[11]. In his final program, bishops are again to be elected by the religious communities of their dioceses and confirmed within a wider ecclesial process^[12]. The Church is therefore not composed of a governing clerical subject and a passive lay object. The baptized community participates in the constitution of ministry itself.

Religious democracy should not be reduced to importing parliamentary procedure into the Church. Costa’s point is more theological. Authority becomes ecclesial when it is exercised within a body in which the members recognize one another as participants rather than as rulers and subjects. This coheres with his description of autonomous early churches as sisters rather than parent-and-child institutions^[13]. It also coheres with his final description of dioceses living in evangelical fraternity, forming one body of bishops, presbyters, and deacons in “true Christian communism”. Communion is therefore not passive obedience. It is common participation in the life and mission of the body.

A liberationist reading presses this democratic principle further. Costa does not explicitly say that workers and the poor, precisely as oppressed social groups, should possess a privileged role in ecclesial governance. Yet his economic analysis insists that formal freedom is fictitious when people are deprived of the material conditions necessary to exercise it^[14]. Read together with his religious democracy, this implies that ecclesial participation cannot remain merely formal. If working people lack time, education, security, or access to the institutions that make decisions, the existence of a nominal vote does not, by itself, create an egalitarian Church.

The constructive development of Costa’s position is therefore a materially grounded synodality. A participatory Church must organize its life so that those who are structurally excluded from social power can genuinely speak, deliberate, lead, and decide. The poor cannot remain recipients of clerical charity; workers cannot remain the objects of pastoral concern. They must become ecclesial subjects whose experience of exploitation, exploited labor, dispossession, racism, migration, debt, housing insecurity, and social abandonment contributes to the Church’s discernment of what fidelity to Christ requires. This conclusion develops Costa’s conjunction of religious democracy and material freedom, even if he does not formulate it in precisely these later liberation-theological terms^[15].

Sacramental Catholicity Without Clerical Privilege

Costa’s ecclesiology is reformist but not anti-sacramental. He preserves the traditional hierarchy of deacons, presbyters, and bishops and explicitly maintains episcopal consecration and priestly ordination through a received sacramental rite^[16]. He is concerned that the validity of orders not be placed in doubt, which demonstrates that apostolic continuity and sacramental ministry remain integral to his understanding of the Church.^[17]

What he rejects is the transformation of sacramental office into a privileged caste. His abolition of compulsory celibacy, permission for priests to marry, and insistence that clergy may hold civil professions place ordained ministers back within ordinary social ^[18]. The most revealing example is his reference to having ordained a factory worker^[19]. Read positively, it suggests a ministry located within the world of labor rather than socially removed from it.

For a religious communist ecclesiology, this de-clericalizing impulse is important. Clericalism is not only arrogance or bad behavior; it is a social relation produced when sacramental office becomes a source of class distinction, economic insulation, or unilateral authority. Costa’s working priesthood offers one possible corrective. Ordained ministry can remain sacramental while refusing the assumption that holiness requires separation from the material conditions of ordinary people.

This principle must nevertheless be developed carefully. Liberation cannot mean romanticizing poverty or requiring clergy to endure economic insecurity. The constructive point, instead, is that ministry should not create a privileged social estate. Clergy should live in material solidarity with the people, remain economically and institutionally accountable to their communities, and understand sacramental leadership as service rather than possession. Sacramentality, then, does not disappear under a democratic ecclesiology; it is purified of domination and returned to the service of communion^[20].

Freedom of Conscience, Religious Liberty, and Political Independence

Costa’s vision of the Church is inseparable from his vision of freedom. His quoting of Rubi Barbosa, who proclaimed “a free Church for a free State,^[21]” presents a model in which ecclesial and political institutions are differentiated, and neither should dominate the conscience of the other^[22]. This conviction appears again when Costa criticizes religious intolerance and argues that coercion produces division rather than authentic unity^[23]. He names freedom of speech, worship, education, and movement among the rights necessary for human life, while treating thought and conscience as inwardly irrepressible^[24]. His final ecclesial program provides an “absolute guarantee” of civil, political, philosophical, and religious freedom and rejects discrimination based upon a person’s beliefs.

For an Independent Catholic ecclesiology, this is decisive. Independence cannot mean only freedom from Roman jurisdiction. A Church that is formally independent but captured by the state, a political party, wealthy patrons, nationalist ideology, or a clerical elite has merely exchanged one form of domination for another. Ecclesial independence must therefore be understood relationally: the Church is free so that it may be faithful to Christ, and it protects the freedom of conscience of others because faith itself cannot be produced through coercion.

Costa’s own imprisonment makes the danger concrete. His account depicts ecclesiastical and state power cooperating to confine and politically discredit him^[25]. Whether every detail of his account can be historically verified is a separate question; the constructive lesson remains that a Church seeking political power risks becoming an instrument of repression, while a state that allows ecclesial authorities to determine political legitimacy threatens freedom of conscience. Costa’s concluding rejection of clerical domination over national political life returns directly to this concern^[26].

The positive ecclesiology that follows is neither apolitical nor theocratic. It is politically engaged because the Gospel concerns freedom, justice, and the material conditions of life, but it refuses to become an apparatus of political domination. Its political witness must be persuasive, prophetic, communal, and accountable rather than coercive^[27].

Labor, Property, Land, and the Material Conditions of Freedom

Costa’s ecclesiology cannot be separated from his social thought because his account of freedom is explicitly material. He argues that political rights are incomplete when people lack the economic means necessary to sustain life and exercise human agency^[28]. He identifies the equal right to work as a natural economic right and connects meaningful freedom to access to the material conditions of production^[29]. He further develops this argument by linking poverty, wage dependence, and proletarianization to monopolization of land and natural resources^[30].

The heart of Costa’s property theory lies in his distinction between what is produced by labor and what is given in nature. The fruits of labor may legitimately belong to the worker because labor produces them^[31]. Land and natural resources, by contrast, are not products of individual labor but gifts of God whose use is necessary for life and therefore cannot be morally monopolized by a minority^[32]. Costa’s argument is theological before it is technical: creation is a gift before it is a commodity.

He then attempts to translate this conviction into a concrete social proposal through common or national ownership of land while preserving a distinction between collective ownership of natural resources and personal ownership of improvements produced through labor^[33]. He then expands the vision toward the abolition of economic privilege and monopoly, equal freedom, common access to natural resources, international solidarity, socialist development, peace, and the Kingdom of God^[34]. The adequacy of Costa’s economic mechanism may be debated, but its ecclesiological implication is difficult to avoid: a Church that proclaims the Creator cannot treat creation as though its moral meaning were exhausted by private title.

This gives the Church a responsibility beyond philanthropy. If poverty is produced by social relations that deny people access to the means of life, charity after deprivation cannot be the Church’s only answer. The Church must also interrogate the arrangements that create deprivation. Material justice therefore belongs to ecclesiology because the credibility of the Church’s proclamation depends upon the social relations it blesses, tolerates, contests, and embodies.

The Poor and Workers as Subjects of the Church

A constructive Costaian ecclesiology consequently changes the place of the poor within the Church. Costa’s own language about the masses, workers, wage slavery, and social dispossession demonstrates that poverty is not simply an individual misfortune, but a social relation generated by unequal control over the means of life^[35]. His final ecclesial structure, meanwhile, insists upon communal participation and even imagines ordained ministry emerging directly from the working class^[36].

When these elements are read together, the poor cannot be treated only as recipients of ecclesial benevolence. They must become subjects of theology, governance, and mission. Their social location discloses realities that an economically insulated Church can easily fail to see. The knowledge of the worker, tenant, migrant, prisoner, unemployed person, and dispossessed community is not supplementary sociological information. It is part of the concrete reality within which the Church discerns what love of neighbor, justice, and solidarity require.

This does not mean that poverty itself is spiritually superior or that every political judgment made by an oppressed person is automatically correct. It means that a Church committed to liberation must dismantle structures that render oppressed people voiceless while claiming to speak on their behalf. Costa’s religious democracy becomes liberationist only when participation is materially possible and when ecclesial institutions are accountable to those most harmed by the surrounding social order^[37].

The Church as a Community Anticipating the Kingdom

Costa’s social vision culminates in eschatological language. He imagines the overcoming of monopoly, the expansion of equal freedom, the realization of socialist ideals, and the establishment of peace as signs of humanity moving toward the fulfillment of Christianity and the Kingdom of God^[38]. This language should not be interpreted as a simple identification of the Kingdom with one economic program. Costa’s proposals remain historically conditioned and subject to theological criticism. What his argument does establish is that the Kingdom concerns social relations and material life, not only private spirituality.

The Church, therefore, should be understood as an anticipatory community of the Kingdom. It does not possess the Kingdom, and institutional expansion is not identical with the Kingdom’s coming. Rather, the Church becomes a sign of the Kingdom when its own common life embodies reconciliation, participation, freedom, shared dignity, and material justice. Costa’s final description of dioceses living in evangelical fraternity, helping one another and forming one body in “true Christian communism,” gives ecclesial form to this anticipation^[39].

This is where the different elements of Costa’s manifesto converge. Christ judges the Church, so ecclesial structures remain reformable^[40]. The Church is episcopal and apostolic, so ministry and sacramental continuity matter^[41]. It is non-monarchical and conciliar, so no single office can absorb the authority of the whole^[42]. It is locally rooted, so concrete communities must possess genuine responsibility for their ministers and mission^[43]. It is committed to freedom of conscience, so faith cannot be produced by coercion^[44]. It is materially accountable, so land, labor, property, and poverty are ecclesial questions rather than merely secular matters^[45]. And it is liberating only when those who suffer domination participate as agents in its own life^[46].

The Final Analysis

In the final analysis, the positive ecclesiology that can be constructed from the Manifesto to the Nation is not a finished system that Costa himself presents in academic form. It is a theological pattern retrieved from the relation among his Christology, his account of the early Church, his institutional program for the ICAB, and his analysis of material injustice. That pattern is sufficiently coherent to describe a recognizable ecclesial vision: a Church centered on Christ rather than on institutional self-preservation; episcopal yet non-monarchical; sacramental yet resistant to clerical privilege; conciliar, locally rooted, and democratically participatory; independent of political domination; protective of conscience; and materially accountable to workers, the poor, and the dispossessed^[47].

From an Independent Catholic and religious communist standpoint, the central constructive insight is that the Church cannot proclaim liberation externally while reproducing domination internally. Its polity, sacramental life, economic practices, ministerial structures, and relation to political power must themselves become objects of conversion. Costa’s ecclesiology therefore presses beyond the question of whether the Church teaches justice. It asks whether the Church is organized justly.

If Christ is truly the center of the Church, then authority must take the form of accountable service; apostolicity must sustain communion without monarchy; sacrament must deepen solidarity rather than privilege; local autonomy must remain open to wider catholic fellowship; conscience must be protected rather than mastered; and the material conditions that enslave workers and dispossess communities must become matters of ecclesial discernment and action. Such a Church does not merely announce a future Kingdom. It seeks, provisionally and imperfectly, to become a communal sign of that Kingdom within history: a sacramental body in which liberation is not only preached to the poor but practiced with them.

^[1] Appendix I, Parts 5, 15, 24–25

^[2] Appendix I, Part 25

^[3] Appendix I, Part 5

^[4] Appendix I, Part 15

^[5] Appendix I, Parts 5, 15, 25

^[6] Appendix I, Part 1

^[7] Appendix I, Part 2

^[8] Appendix I, Part 4

^[9] Appendix I, Part 25

^[10] Appendix I, Parts 3, 25

^[11] Appendix I, Part 3

^[12] Appendix I, Part 25

^[13] Appendix I, Parts 2, 4

^[14] Appendix I, Parts 17–19

^[15] Appendix I, Parts 3, 17–19, 25

^[16] Appendix I, Part 25

^[17] Ibid.

^[18] Ibid.

^[19] Ibid.

^[20] Ibid.

^[21] Appendix I, Part 27

^[22] Appendix I, Part 1

^[23] Appendix I, Parts 15–16

^[24] Appendix I, Part 17

^[25] Appendix I, Part 14

^[26] Appendix I, Part 27

^[27] Appendix I, Parts 1, 14–17, 25, 27

^[28] Appendix I, Part 17

^[29] Appendix I, Part 18

^[30] Appendix I, Part 19

^[31] Appendix I, Part 20

^[32] Appendix I, Part 21

^[33] Appendix I, Part 23

^[34] Appendix I, Part 24Appendix I, Part 24

^[35] Appendix I, Parts 17–21

^[36] Appendix I, Part 25

^[37] Appendix I, Parts 3, 17–21, 25

^[38] Appendix I, Part 24

^[39] Appendix I, Part 25

^[40] Appendix I, Parts 5, 15, 25

^[41] Appendix I, Parts 3–4, 25

^[42] Appendix I, Parts 1–4, 25

^[43] Appendix I, Parts 2–3, 25

^[44] Appendix I, Parts 15–17, 25

^[45] Appendix I, Parts 17–24

^[46] Appendix I, Parts 3, 17–21, 25

^[47] Appendix I, Parts 1–5, 15–21, 23–25, 27

Part 1: The Forgotten Ecclesiology of Carlos Duarte Costa

Carlos Duarte Costa is remembered primarily as the Roman Catholic bishop who broke with Rome and founded the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church, the Igreja Católica Apostólica Brasileira (ICAB). Scholarship commonly presents him as the founder of a schismatic church, an excommunicated bishop, and an uncompromising critic of papal authority. Although these descriptions identify important features of his career, they interpret Costa largely in terms of his conflict with Rome. They explain what he rejected without adequately asking what he intended to construct.

This emphasis has obscured the positive ecclesiology contained in Costa’s 1945 Manifesto to the Nation. The manifesto is unmistakably polemical. Costa condemns papal monarchy, clerical privilege, ecclesiastical wealth, fascism, capitalism, and the political alliances of the Roman hierarchy. Yet his purpose is not simply to denounce Rome. Beneath the polemic is a sustained attempt to describe the conditions under which the Church might again become the Church of Christ recognizably.

Costa does not merely reject papal supremacy; he retrieves episcopal collegiality, conciliar government, local autonomy, and the participation of clergy and laity in the election of ministers. He not only criticizes clerical privilege; he also proposes a ministry rooted in ordinary social and economic life. His treatment of labor, land, property, and poverty also indicates that social justice is not secondary to ecclesiology. The Church’s structure, authority, and mission must correspond to the Christ it proclaims. Costa summarizes this constructive purpose when he states that the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church seeks to “centralize the person of Christ” and restore “the Church of Christ in its purity”^[1].

The central problem of this thesis is therefore both historical and theological. Costa has generally been understood in light of the circumstances of his excommunication and the institutional consequences of his separation from Rome. Comparatively little attention has been given to the ecclesial vision underlying that separation. What kind of Church was Costa attempting to build? Was the ICAB simply a national alternative to Roman jurisdiction, or did the Manifesto to the Nation contain a coherent understanding of ecclesial identity, authority, participation, mission, and social responsibility?

The principal research question of this study is: Does the Manifesto to the Nation contain a coherent constructive ecclesiology, and, if so, how does that ecclesiology anticipate liberation theology, especially but not limited to the thought of Leonardo Boff^[2]?

This question does not assume that Costa produced a systematic theological treatise. The manifesto combines biblical interpretation, early Church history, political accusation, economic reflection, personal testimony, and institutional proposals. Its ecclesiology must therefore be retrieved from a text that is prophetic and programmatic rather than formally systematic. The issue is not whether Costa developed a complete academic doctrine of the Church, but whether the manifesto contains sufficiently consistent theological principles to support the construction of a positive ecclesiology.

Part 2: Historical Context

Such a retrieval must begin with historical context. Theologians function as social actors within particular political, ecclesial, and economic circumstances. The questions an ecclesiology addresses are shaped by what its author perceives to be at stake within those circumstances. No ecclesiology is entirely neutral; every doctrine of the Church makes judgments about authority, community, power, and the relationship between Christian faith and social reality. As Leonardo Boff argues, theology arises from a committed social location rather than from a position outside history^[3].

Costa’s thought developed during the Romanization of Brazilian Catholicism, through which the Holy See sought to strengthen papal authority, standardize ecclesiastical practice, and respond to liberalism, socialism, secularization, and religious competition. The separation of Church and state following the proclamation of the Brazilian Republic in 1889 permitted closer relations between Rome and the national hierarchy, while also intensifying debates concerning the Church’s role in public life. Romanization brought the hierarchy into conflict with popular Catholic traditions and liberal sectors of the clergy, exposing the difficulty of imposing a uniform ecclesiastical model within Brazil’s diverse religious environment. Born in 1888 and educated partly at the Pontifical Latin American College in Rome, Costa was ordained in 1911 and appointed Bishop of Botucatu in 1924, initially appearing to embody the Roman model of episcopal leadership^[4].

His political activity and reformist positions, however, increasingly placed him in conflict with both the Vatican and the Brazilian state. Costa supported the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, advocated worship in the vernacular, opposed mandatory clerical celibacy, promoted greater lay participation, and denounced what he believed to be Nazi-fascist influence within the Brazilian clergy. His criticism extended beyond ecclesiastical discipline to the Church’s relationship with political power and social inequality. After his removal from the Diocese of Botucatu in 1937, his continued opposition to Catholic authorities resulted in the suspension of his ecclesiastical activities and his excommunication in July 1945. In the same year, he founded the ICAB as a national, reformist, and socially engaged Catholic body that rejected papal supremacy^[5].

Before his excommunication, Costa was transferred to Belo Horizonte and placed under house arrest by the Brazilian government, reportedly at the request of the Apostolic Nuncio and the Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro. He was accused of being a communist, an accusation reinforced by his favorable writings concerning the Soviet Union ^[6]. His detention illustrates how ecclesiastical and state authorities could cooperate to suppress political and religious dissent. It also demonstrates how accusations of communism could be used to discredit criticism of established ecclesiastical and economic arrangements.^[7]

Part 3: Ecclesiological Impact

Costa’s ecclesiology emerged from these conflicts, but it cannot be reduced to them. Its constructive center is Christological. The Church must be judged by the Christ it embodies rather than merely by the Christ it verbally confesses. In the manifesto, Christ is the eternal Word, the light of humanity, and the judge of religious hypocrisy. Ecclesial offices and institutions possess no unconditional legitimacy. They remain accountable to the Gospel, particularly to Christ’s demands for justice, mercy, honesty, freedom, and fraternity.

This Christological principle governs Costa’s rejection of papal monarchy. He presents the early Church as a communion of local churches whose bishops exercised authority collegially and remained accountable to their communities. He highlights the participation of clergy and laity in choosing bishops, priests, and deacons, describing this practice as “true religious democracy”^[8]. These historical arguments become constructive proposals: bishops are to be elected by their communities, episcopal authority is to be exercised through councils, and local churches are to possess genuine autonomy while remaining in catholic communion^[9].

Costa therefore does not reject sacramental, apostolic, or episcopal Christianity. He attempts to reconstruct these traditions in a participatory and conciliar form. Authority is necessary, but it must be ministerial rather than dominating, accountable rather than absolute, and Christological rather than self-validating.

Part 4: Ecclesiology and Social Responsibility

His ecclesiology is also inseparable from his social thought. Costa treats labor, land, property, and poverty as matters of Christian concern. He distinguishes ownership of the fruits of labor from the private monopolization of land and natural resources, which he understands as gifts of God intended for all^[10]. Whatever limitations may be found in his economic theory, its ecclesiological consequence is clear: the Church cannot credibly proclaim Christ while defending arrangements that deprive people of the material conditions necessary for life and work. The poor and workers cannot remain merely objects of charity. They must become active participants in ecclesial discernment, governance, and mission.

Part 5: Thematic Anticipations of Latin American Liberation Theology

These themes place Costa in an anticipatory relationship to Latin American liberation theology. He should not be described as a liberation theologian in the strict historical sense. The manifesto predates liberation theology by more than two decades, and Costa does not employ its developed language of praxis, structural sin, or the preferential option for the poor. His thought arises from early Church history, natural-rights reasoning, anti-fascist politics, and ecclesiastical reform. Nevertheless, his insistence that the Gospel judges the institutional Church, that poverty has structural causes, and that ecclesial authority must be participatory anticipates themes that later became central to liberationist ecclesiology.

Leonardo Boff serves as the principal dialogue partner for evaluating this anticipation. This thesis does not claim that Boff derived his theology directly from Costa. There is no sufficient evidence of direct influence. Their relationship is better understood as one of anticipation and systematic development. Costa argues prophetically for local churches, lay participation, episcopal collegiality, evangelical fraternity, and solidarity with the poor. Boff later develops comparable concerns through his theology of the People of God, Basic Ecclesial Communities, charism, ecclesiogenesis, institutional conversion, and the priority of the Kingdom of God over the Church’s self-preservation.

This thesis argues that the Manifesto to the Nation contains a coherent constructive ecclesiology, although its coherence is Christological and practical rather than formally systematic. Its governing conviction is that Christ and the Gospel judge every ecclesiastical institution. From this principle emerges a Church that is episcopal but non-monarchical, sacramental but opposed to clerical privilege, conciliar and participatory, rooted in local communities, independent of political control, committed to freedom of conscience, and accountable to workers, the poor, and the socially dispossessed. Costa anticipates liberation theology not because he already possesses its later methodology, but because he identifies ecclesial problems and constructive possibilities that Boff and others subsequently develop with greater theological precision.

Part 6: Constructive Outline

The study proceeds through five movements. First, it retrieves the manifesto’s Christological and ecclesiological principles from its polemical form. Second, it develops a Costaian hermeneutic organized around critique, retrieval, and reconstruction. Third, it applies that hermeneutic to Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Divini Redemptoris. Fourth, it places the resulting ecclesiology in dialogue with multiple liberation theologians, but primarily Leonardo Boff. Finally, it constructs a positive ecclesiology that addresses authority, participation, labor, property, political independence, sacramental life, and solidarity with the poor, which I believe the Church ought to turn to today if it is going to meaningfully and tangibly address the issues of the current moment.

The objective is not to defend every historical claim made by Costa or to accept his description of the three encyclicals uncritically as “fascist documents”^[11]. Costa must also remain subject to historical criticism and Christological judgment. Nevertheless, his central question deserves recovery: if the Church proclaims Christ as servant, liberator, and defender of human dignity, what form must the Church assume to make that proclamation credible? Costa’s forgotten ecclesiology answers that the Church must not merely teach justice. It must become a participatory, sacramental, and liberating embodiment of the justice it proclaims.

Part 7: Constructive and Ideological Bias

My theological interest in the thought of Carlos Duarte Costa is not, and does not pretend to be, impartial. I approach Costa as an Independent Catholic and as a religious communist, and my reading is therefore intentionally oriented toward theological frameworks concerned with liberation, material justice, ecclesial participation, and the transformation of oppressive social relations. Such a declaration of social and theological location is itself consistent with the methodological insight of liberation theology that theological reflection emerges from concrete historical commitments and practices rather than from an abstract or politically neutral standpoint.

At the same time, I recognize that Costa and the Latin American liberation theologians with whom he will be placed in conversation emerged from particular social, historical, ecclesial, and political contexts that cannot simply be transferred wholesale into another time and place. The Brazil of Costa and Boff, and the locations of other Latin American liberation theologians, are not Lansing, Michigan, nor are the forms of exploitation, ecclesiastical authority, political repression, poverty, or resistance identical. Nevertheless, I contend that the theological responses developed within those contexts possess a critical and constructive capacity that extends beyond their original contexts. Their methods of reading social reality, judging ecclesial structures in light of the Gospel, identifying relations of domination, and constructing forms of Christian community oriented toward liberation can illuminate the conditions of contemporary urban and rural communities throughout the United States, including my own context in Lansing.

This constructive task, however, also requires a recognition of its own limitations. Constructive theology does not stand outside history, ideology, or social location, and it cannot claim to produce a universally applicable ecclesiology immune from revision. Any theological construction is necessarily selective: it emphasizes certain sources, experiences, conflicts, and categories while risking the neglect of others. My own Christian and communist commitments sharpen questions concerning class, power, property, authority, labor, and liberation, but they may also incline me toward certain interpretations and away from others. The ecclesiology developed here must therefore remain provisional, accountable to Scripture, tradition, historical evidence, concrete communities, and especially to the voices of those whose experiences challenge the assumptions of the theologian. Nor should the contextual appropriation of Costa and Latin American liberation theology erase the historical particularity of either. The task is not to reproduce their conclusions mechanically, but to enter critical conversation with them and to test their categories against another social reality.

The ecclesiology constructed in this study should therefore be understood neither as a disinterested reconstruction of Costa nor as an attempt merely to transplant Latin American liberation theology into a North American setting. It is a contextual and deliberately situated theological construction arising from the encounter between Costa’s ecclesial vision, the insights and practices of liberation theology, and my own social, ecclesial, and political commitments. What follows is consequently an ecclesiology shaped consciously by both my Christian confession and my communist commitment: an effort to ask what form the Church must take if fidelity to Christ is to be embodied concretely in solidarity with the oppressed, the democratization of ecclesial life, and the struggle for a social order directed toward the common good, while remaining open to correction wherever the realities of history, community, and human suffering expose the inadequacy of the construction itself.

^[1] Appendix I, Part 25

^[2] Boff was chosen as a primary conversation partner over others because of his location within Brazil, including the effects of his own time that stemmed from many of the socio-political conditions that Costa was experiencing 20-30 years prior.

^[3] Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator, p. 265

^[4] de Macedo, M.R. ,2018

^[5] de Macedo, M.R. ,2018

^[6] Jarvis, p. 70

^[7] A tactic that was also used by the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith to discredit and misrepresent a great deal of Latin American liberation theology, such as in the document, INSTRUCTION ON CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE “THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION”, 1984

^[8] Appendix I, Part 3

^[9] Appendix I, Part 25

^[10] Appendix I, Parts 17–24

^[11] Appendix I, Part 9

APPENDIX I:

Manifesto^[1] to the Nation

By Carlos Duerte Costa

Bishop of Rio De Janeiro

Translated by Edward Jarvis

PART 1

A FREE CHURCH FOR A FREE STATE

Reading the newspapers of 6 July of the current year, I learned that a man, just like me, with the same powers that I have, a bishop like me, pastor of souls like I am, had excommunicated me.

People of Brazil, take heed, during the first thousand years of the Church, no point of doctrine was ever received as definitive, simply through being the subject of a papal decree.

The Pope is simply the Bishop of Rome, just as I was Bishop of Botucatu, and then Titular Bishop of Maura, and now by popular acclamation Bishop of Rio de Janeiro.

The Bishops of Rome, in the first four centuries of Christianity, never took part in settling disagreements with sects of Gnostics, Montanists, and Chiliasts.

There does not exist, in history, any trace of a specifically dogmatic pontifical decree in the first four centuries of the Church. Even in Paul of Samosata’s dispute over Christ, in the Eastern Church, which provoked many an important synod, no Bishop of Rome played any part.

I say Bishop of Rome, and not Pope, because this name Pope, which means father, by decree of Gregory VII in the Roman Synod of 1073, he, Gregory the Seventh, arrogated it exclusively to his person. Meanwhile in the Greek Church, even the ordinary priests were called popes, considered by the faithful to be spiritual fathers. From Gregory VII on-wards, then, the Popes consider themselves Fathers of all Christendom; that is what the Pope is supposed to be. Gregory VII created this honorific title for himself and his successors in the See of Rome.

PART 2

Remember, my brother in the episcopate, Eugenio Pacelli, that the first collective manifestation of the Christian Church was in Jerusalem, presided over by James, Bishop of Jerusalem, and not by Peter, dubbed Prince of the Apostles by the Roman

Church. The epistles of St Peter testify that this principality did not exist among the early Christians, the faith of Peter meriting faith equal to the faith of all the apostles, each of them fallible, because they were men like the rest of us.

Up to the fourth century, the Church considered by the Eastern Bishops to be the greatest of all the Churches, as the communities were called, was the Church of Jerusalem.

In the first centuries of Christianity, the National Churches lived and developed with complete autonomy, without subjugation to the Bishop of Rome. I cite the testimony of Tertullian, when he says: “Our numerous Churches regard themselves as being all the same Church, the prime one being that founded by the Apostles, and therefore greater than all the others. They are all apostolic and, together, do not add up to more than one alone, in the communion of Peace, in mutual brotherly treatment, in the bonds of hospitality that unite all the faithful.

PART 3

The laity and priests used to choose their bishops, priests, and deacons, and this system lasted until the twelfth century, in the Gallican Church. The faithful participated not only in the election of their bishops, priests, and deacons, but they also took part in the assemblies of the councils, in true religious democracy. In the election of the successor of St. James, first Bishop of Jerusalem, the apostles, disciples, and still-living relatives of Our Lord all took part, Simeon being chosen, as Eusebius testifies, in his 3rd book, Chapter 2.And St. Clement, at the end of the first century, says that this procedure was held and maintained as a precept and, later, the Nicean fathers qualify the procedure as being in uninterrupted usage.

PART 4

Between the years 253-257, at Carthage, gathered the bishops of Mauritania and Numidia, in the dispute over the baptism by heretics. And the African bishops, convoked in council by Cyprian, decree that baptism conferred by heretics was not authentic in accordance with the opinion of Steven, Bishop of Rome. In spite of this, says St. Augustine, in his book 2, chapter 15, on baptism, the bishops of east and west should not judge schismatic their African colleagues, and remain in unity with them’. Why did Steven’s notorious decision not prevail? ‘Because the Church had not spoken in council, St. Augustine tells us, in his Book Four on baptism. And even, on that occasion, Firmilian, Bishop of Cesarea, doubted that the anathemas of the Bishop of Rome had ‘body and soul”, while Cyprian called the Bishop of Rome proud, obstinate, imprudent, and heretical. Let us not judge anyone’, ‘let us not segregate from our communion those who do not share our point of view. None of us wants to pass himself off as bishop of the bishops, nor force his colleagues to obey him through tyrannical terror, because each of us is fully master of his own will and power, and so as none may be judged, likewise none has the right to judge’

As anyone can verify, the government of the Church since primordial time has rested with the united episcopate, not in the hands of the Bishop of Rome, being as he is equal to any other bishop.”

The Bishop of Rome, placing temporal and political interests over and above the interests of Christ, is, ipso facto, since centuries past, excommunicated through world public opinion, and segregated, there-fore, from the true Church of Christ. Taking full advantage of temporal power, rather than universalize the government of the Catholic Church, he Italianized it, leaving the lands of Italy, Spain, and Gaul to Christian-ize themselves without recourse to the Bishop of Rome. Those Churches did not model themselves on that of Rome, they were not her affiliates: they were her sisters, not her children, the Supreme Roman Pontificate being completely unknown, and to which, during the first six-hundred years, no Church was affiliated, except towards the end of the fourth century, in Saxony.

PART 5

EXCOMMUNICATION

In view of this, People of Brazil, take note that the Bishop of Rome, Eugenio Pacelli, does not have the power to excommunicate me, and, in accordance with the above explanation, I am more Bishop of Rio de Janeiro through being chosen by popular acclamation than he is Bishop of Rome through being chosen by Italian Cardinals.

Nor, in this century, is excommunication credible, being a political weapon of the Middle Ages, when the Bishop of Rome, oblivious to the “magna carta’ of the Gospels that is the sermon on the mount, spewed forth his loathing towards emperors and kings who would not submit to his will, and turned the cross into a weapon for soaking humanity with blood, causing Christ to declare his damnation when he said:

‘Woe unto you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees! Hypocrites!

You lock the door to the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces, nor do you yourselves go inside, nor do you allow in those who are trying to enter!’

Woe unto you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees! Hypocrites!

You take advantage of widows and rob them of their homes, and then make a show of saying long prayers! Your punishment will be all the worse for this!

Woe unto you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees! Hypocrites!

You give to God a tenth of the seasoned herbs, such as mint, dill, and cumin, but you neglect the really important teachings of the Law, such as justice and mercy and honesty. These you should practice without omitting the others. Blind guides! You sift the fly out of your glass and then drink a camel!

Woe unto you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees! Hypocrites!

You clean the outside of your cup and plate, while the inside is full of what you have obtained by violence and selfishness.

‘You snakes and sons of snakes! How do you expect to escape from being condemned to hell?’

What a contrast between these fiery damnations, between these vehement condemnations from Our Lord, and his attitude towards the gravest sinners: the Samaritan woman, Mary Magdalene, the adulterous woman, all of whom he pardoned without a word of censure; the criminals, the good thief, who were promised Heaven!

Why this contrast? And why these terrible condemnations from Jesus?

Because all manner of failure, or misery, humbly recognized and admitted, draws the compassion and mercy of God. While pride merely draws indignation.

PART 6

FASCISM

The good people of Brazil know that I was excommunicated because on the 17 September 1942 I sent the following by telegram to His Excellency the President of the Republic: “As soon as Your Excellency shall declare mobilization I shall pledge my unreserved solidarity placing myself at the Nation’s disposal.

Along with the general mobilization, calling all Brazilians to the defense of the homeland, I must point out the need for another mobilization — a spiritual one, so that we do not see happen in Brazil what happened in France, which means the necessary suppression of all those dioceses, prelatures, parishes, convents, colleges, bishops, prelates, priests, friars, nuns, both foreign and national, who are followers of Nazi-Fascism-Falangism.”

The crimes of the clergy, during the war, are public knowledge. Unpunished, because as the Nation knows the Security Tribunal is made up of fascists.

I was excommunicated because I prefaced the book The Soviet Power’ by the Dean of Canterbury, a book that depicts Russia faithfully, just as it is. A Russia, I would say, that ceases to inspire terror. A Russia glorified by all free peoples, among independent nations. Russia, soldier at the service of the democracies, against the totalitarian tyrannies that, in their bloodlust, crush cultures, thus holding back the advance of civilization.

PART 7

FASCIST EPISCOPATE

I was excommunicated because I denounced the links between the Hispanidad organization and the Brazilian Episcopate, together with the Episcopate of the other American nations - northern, central, and southern. Effectively, they formed a Fascist Church in the post-war era. The Falange in action. The organization consisted of a committee, formed from the Fascist parties of Portugal and Spain, with government aid from Lisbon and Madrid. Raimundo Fernando Cuesta, Spanish Ambassador in Brazil, was the head. From Rio de Janeiro, Cuesta directed all the activities of the Falangists in South America.

With his five secretaries, aided by diplomatic passports, Cuesta communicated with the whole of America, organizing the movement which was meant to culminate with the establishment of an Iberian Empire; the dictators Salazar and Franco united in order to swallow up the nations of America, reestablishing, thus, Papal omnipotence. The Falangist organ was Nueva España [New Spain], edited at 70, Araújo Porto Alegre Avenue, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, communicator of news to Berlin from the Spanish Embassy. When Brazil’s state of war made the Falange’s work difficult, the headquarters of Hispanidad moved to Argentina. And I [personally] followed the Spanish Embassy’s car closely, as it headed to the Apostolic Nunciature and stayed there for hours and hours more. And the Brazilian people know that I do not lie.

PART 8

THE SOVIET UNION

I was excommunicated because I quoted these words of my brother, Eugenio Pacelli, in an article of mine, published in my journal The Messenger of Our Lady The Child Mary: ‘In a war in which one of the belligerents achieves complete victory only by the sword and other methods of irresistible force, it is undeniable that such a belligerent finds himself in a position to be able to dictate a peace imposed by force.” My brother, Eugenio Pacelli, was referring to the Soviet Union.”

PART 9

THE SHELVING OF THE ENCYCLICALS

I was excommunicated because I believed that for the dissemination of Social Justice it was necessary to shelve the encyclicals Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Divini Redemptoris, because they are all fascist documents.

PART 10

I AM NOT A BISHOP

I know that my brother, Eugenio Pacelli, started a rumor worldwide that I am not a bishop. This is how he behaves because he is accustomed to lying, and sought to undermine the schism initiated. He knows, however, that I was elected Bishop of Botucatu, on 4 July 1924 and that I was consecrated bishop, in the Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro, on 8 December, 1924, by Cardinal Sebastião Leme da Silveira Cintra; Dom Benedito Paulo Alves de Souza, then Bishop of Espirito Santo and today Titular Bishop of Orisa, and Dom Alberto José Gonçalves, Bishop of Ribeirão Preto, recently deceased, were my co-consecrators.

PART 11

THE NUNCIO ORDERS DESTRUCTION

My brother Eugenio Pacelli’s representative in Brazil, aware of the extraordinary events surrounding the image of Maria Santissima Bambina, brought over from Milan by me, so that the people of my diocese could venerate the infancy of the Most Holy Virgin, a devotion so dear to the people of Milan since 1735 due to events, they too extraordinary, depicted on the walls of the Sanctuary, he, the Apostolic Nuncio in Brazil, ordered the destruction of the image placed by me in Botucatu, seeking thereby to destroy my image too. That order was given to the Bishop of Sorocaba, apostolic administrator of the diocese of Botucatu, when I was forced to leave the diocese by the machinations of the Apostolic Nuncio. A copy of that letter was made by Father José Kretz, since mysteriously disappeared from among the living. The Church tends to act this way whenever someone’s being alive might pose a threat to it.

PART 12

THE POISONING OF CANON AMORIM

Canon Manoel Carlos de Amorim Correia was the founder of the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church, in São Paulo State, on 30 January 1912 [sic]. Having come down with a cold, he was poisoned by the pharmacist, who was bought off with ten million Reals and a free education for his two daughters. Filled with remorse, [the pharmacist] made this disclosure on his deathbed. In homage to Canon Manoel Carlos de Amorim Correia, I hereby revive his project, naming it the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church after the Church founded by him, which did not progress because he was not a bishop.

PART 13

FASCISM IN ROMANIA

Intimidated by the Communist menace, the Greek Orthodox Church in Romania united itself to the Roman Church - that is to say, to Nazism.

The Archbishop and the Bishops, with the exception of one, Monsignor Fielder [sic], became agents of Hitler.

All the parishes, monasteries, schools, and the Catholic press were placed at the service of Nazism and Fascism.

In every parish, there was a branch of the Fascio, all of them following the orders of an Italian priest nominated director by Mussolini.

In spite of his abysmal moral conduct, at Mussolini’s request, he was promoted to Canon. And one of the eight Catholic priests sent by Goebbels to Romania was nominated by the Metropolitan as Honorary Consistorial Advisor. The Most Reverend Dr. Sherer, chief inspector of the Nazi priests, was rewarded for his services by promotion to Honorary Canon of the Metropolitan Cathedral. And Monsignor Fielder, due to the pressure placed on him, was forced by the Pope to resign his diocese, being kept under the watch of a Nazi German bishop. My brother, Eugenio Pacelli, forgot about the great impression Monsignor Fielder [Fiedler] had made on him when he had said of him, ‘he is a true saint; we are proud to have him as bishop in Romania.’

At the request of Von Papen, my brother Eugenio Pacelli transferred the Apostolic Nuncio in Romania, Monsignor Valerio Valeri, a fanatical Nazi, to be Nuncio in Paris, from where he was obliged to depart at the people’s insistence as soon as the Germans withdrew from the city.

In Romania, Monsignor Valerio Valeri was replaced by the elderly Monsignor André [Andrea] Cassulo, who had as his secretary a Monsignor G. Sensi, son of a Fascist Senator, educated in the spirit of Church-Fascist cooperation.

This is the politics of the Vatican, across the entire world.

PART 14

MY IMPRISONMENT

On 6 July 1944 my house was surrounded by police officers, by order of the government of the Republic, at the request of the Apostolic Nuncio and the Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro in agreement with a group of Brazilian fascists.

My destination was Fortaleza de Santa Cruz. I was then sent to Belo Horizonte where I was declared a communist, and then kept in a house in the city of Bonfim, in Minas Gerais State, with a guard on the door and detectives inside the house.

There I remained until 6 September, 1944, when, at the request of the Brazilian Press Association and the political office of the United Nations, intervening together to the Brazilian government via several Embassies, I was freed.

I hereby express my gratitude to the Brazilian Press Association, particularly its illustrious president Herbert Moses, and the Embassies of the United States, England, and Mexico.

PART 15

THE DEGENERACY OF THE ROMAN CHURCH

I was, therefore, excommunicated because I did not submit to the fascist politics of my brother, Eugenio Pacelli. And the good people of Brazil separate themselves from the Roman Church because they will not accept and do not want to be part of a fascist church.

The public is not ignorant of the fact that the Roman Church, from the moment it ceased to be persecuted, has preferred the indignity of Christians to the dignity of Christianity. And today the Christianity of the Roman Church is that visible history of such a sad past and present, that sincere Christians are obliged to seek interior, spiritual life in the Gospel, without concerning themselves with the words of its ministers.

The Church of Christ is not that which is led by the men of the Roman Church, neglectful of the supernatural character of its mission on Earth. Human passions have deformed it. The world, however, is not neglectful of the fact that it was Christian principles that dominated human nature, brutalized [as it was] by its Pagan inheritance, barbarism, and boorish instincts.

The degeneracy, therefore, of the Roman Church, derives from man and not from its evangelical principles, wherein we find the solution for all society’s ills.

Restore the Church of the first centuries, if you wish to cooperate with worthy people in the restoration of a better world. With this meddling in politics and with this religious intolerance, you will only secure the contempt of Humanity.

In this war, the Roman Church placed itself on the side of Nazi-Fascism, because it, the Roman Church, is fascist in structure, in pontifical encyclicals, and in fact perfect in its fascism, which is like Catholic solidarism. It puts its economic interests before the spiritual good of souls and thus becomes a staunch defender of capitalism and imperialism.

The Church, in its early stages, appeared fluid, and then it crystallized into its precise dogmas. Under the strain of absolutism, these [precise] dogmas disintegrate and reform into a single massive block, forcing people to retreat into beliefs which are individual and free from prejudice — rarefaction ensuing from excessive condensation.

The Church emerged from the catacombs to persecute Christians with its dogmas and legislation. Schism is nothing more than the result of religious intolerance. Persecution, anathemas, and excommunication cannot restore a unity broken by specific circumstances. Division among Catholics occurs because of the pressure of condensation from a hierarchy giving absolute power to its head. Papal infallibility signals the death throes preceding the funeral of the Roman Church. There is no place in the world today for the monarchy of the Papacy.

Excessive religious practices exhaust man, placing him within intolerant dogmatism, limiting his freedom and compelling him to think with the mind of his religious leaders, leading Humanity to revolutions and wars.

[But] From constraint and coercion human solidarity is born.

Was it not from Judaism that Christianity and Islam were born?

PART 16

EXCESSIVE PRESSURE SUFFOCATES

Between psychological and physical-chemical laws there is the greatest of analogy and even identity. Psychical science will never be clear and complete except when this comparison is made. Psychical motions are mechanical. Religious ones are too, at least in their generalities. The passage of physical matter through the three states of solid, liquid, and gaseous, which translates into alternate operations of rarefaction and condensation, is one of the most important phenomena. It takes place, also, in biology, psychology, sociology, and cosmo-sociology [sic], because mechanical laws are general and there is no gulf between the material world and the spirit world.

In chemistry, heat helps different substances to combine, provoking intense condensation, but if it becomes excessive, the result is contrary, and dissociation occurs. This is what happens in psychology, in sociology, and in cosmo-sociology. Persecution and suffering unite, but if the pressure is excessive, it suffocates; if the shared poverty is absolute, then dissensions emerge (as with shared prosperity), and dissociation is such that it leads to dissolution and destruction.

This is what is happening with the Roman Church at this time. She is the defender of private property in order to conserve her own agricultural estates, forgetting that the laws of nature are immutable, eternal. In defense of private property she contradicts the laws of nature, suspending the economic and natural rights of man, the solid foundation of social justice.

PART 17

THE VIOLATION OF NATURAL RIGHTS

Our civilization is based on the violation of these rights. The same goes for our morality, law, and State. Hence, social struggles, revolutions, and wars. Poor distribution of wealth has always been the motive of economic crises, with the masses not allowed to take part in the banquet of nature, thus always prolonging the crisis of permanent misery in the world.

From the equal right to life emerges the right of every person to seek to satisfy his desires. This right translates to the equal right to engage in human activities directed towards this end, what we call constitutional rights or political rights.

These constitutional rights cover three categories: one refers to the equal right to existence - personal guarantee, self-defense, inviolability of the home, freedom of residence and movement, conditions, all the necessary for the exercise of human activities; another category refers to the exercise of activities with spiritual predominance - freedom of speech, worship, education, not including freedom of thought or conscience because these are purely subjective, internal and therefore irrepressible and unlimited: another category, finally, refers to activities of an economic character.

The first two groups are based on political rights; the third group is based on the fundamental and natural economic rights of man, the true theoretical and practical aspiration of individualism, whose starting point is the affirmation of the natural rights of the individual, both political and economic, constituting the unavoidable bases of a precisely organized society, that is, founded on true social justice.

The economic rights of man refer to obtaining the economic means necessary for the satisfaction of human desires through commerce.

To the negation of economic rights we owe the failure of so-called Manchesterian liberalism, of classical liberalism, of purely political liberalism, and the frustration of all the hopes put forward in the Constitutions.

These Constitutions professed to guarantee natural rights but in practice denied them, recognizing private ownership of natural resources and, through that, denying equal right to life. Hence the hybrid interventionism of the State, of social order in workers’ legislation which is the negation of freedom, an offense to the dignity of labor, the creator of wealth.

The equal right of all people to exercise their own economic activities derives from natural economic rights. This is what we call pro-duction.

The production of economic means takes four forms:

1. Transferring - raw materials such as ore, fishing and hunting;

2. Creating - as in agriculture;

3. Transforming - as in industry;

4. By exchanging - as in the various branches of commerce whose trade activities create value, and since the aim of production is to satisfy human desires, it is only when the trade realizes these activities that the production stage ceases.

Human activity directed towards the production of economic means is called work. The equal right to work is therefore the first of the natural economic rights.

PART 18

THE EQUAL RIGHT TO WORK

Work comprises the four forms of production, including trade. Thus, free exchange is the result of a natural right, as essential as freedom of speech or worship; restrictions imposed on free trade constitute a violation of natural rights, much like deprivation of the right to self-defense, and the social consequences are analogous.

Do not confuse the equal right to work with the right to choose one’s job, trade, or profession, as many Constitutions proclaim; this second is derisory, while the former is the birthright of every person, and this birthright is the primary, the most sacred, and imprescriptible of all.

Nor should we confuse the equal right to work with the right to have a job provided by the State. The State is an abstraction as a mode of organization of society, an instrument by which society fulfills its ends or realizes its purposes. The State must not go beyond the duties bestowed upon it by society. And the equal right to work proceeds from nature and precedes the organization of the State itself, and, as such, man has equal right to use the land. Excluding man is the same as killing him, taking from him the means by which he sustains himself, and the State that does so commits armed robbery.

PART 19

THE MASSES LIVE IN POVERTY

This hierarchy of natural rights is thus established:

1. — Equal right to life;

2. — Equal right to work;

3. — Equal right to the use of natural resources or land.

Those who deny the third, deny the former. Thus, the equal right to land use is the second of the natural economic rights of man.

However, what we see is that societies, in their organizations, and even civilization itself, deny this right to man, leaving him deprived of the others and therefore of political rights themselves, since without this equal right to the use of the earth, freedom is nothing more than a fiction. And so a minority enslaves the whole of humanity. The man deprived of the right to use the land is obliged to rent it, thus invoking the famous bronze law of the minimum wage; that is to say, man is reduced to starvation wages, wage slavery; he is a slave; the masses live in poverty, being dependent on their wealthy landowning boss. And as the land is enslaved, man is enslaved. And when the land is not enslaved or monopolized, then formal slavery is imposed, because under such conditions, only then can labor be exploited for the benefit of the privileged classes. How was the modern proletariat formed? With the progressive monopolization of the land, which implies the gradual and ever-increasing dispossession of equal right to the use of natural resources, and class prejudice. Thus, massive current-day fortunes arise alongside a starving multitude which knocks modern civilization to the ground in the reclamation of its rights to live in society.

Capitalism, provoking this tremendous crisis, appropriating the elements of nature and reducing them totally to private property, faces its self-made ruin.

The purpose of the exercise of economic activity is to satisfy desires with the result of this activity and with the character of exclusivity. This faculty of disposition, with exclusive character, constitutes the essence of the legitimate right of property, as in its legal form, it is the power of staking claim.

Here arises the third natural economic right, which is the absolute property right over the fruits of one’s labor.

PART 20

THE INFRACTION OF EQUAL RIGHTS

This right of property is the logical derivation of right equal to labor, assisted and supplemented by right equal to that of the land. The foundation of the right of property is moral law itself, which grants the produced to the producer, or in other words, states that work is the sole foundation of the right to property. No one [else] can participate in the ownership of the fruits of our labor, for if one were to participate, he would have a right, besides his own right to the fruits of his own labor, over the fruit of the labor of another, and these rights would no longer be equal; an inequality characteristic of slavery. Things produced by work are the property of the producer by natural law, and therefore its owner is not limited in consuming, giving, or bequeathing them. Any limitation of this power to dispose which does not derive from a higher right to life of the members of the community is an infraction of the equal right of each member, and therefore a violation of natural law.

PART 21

A DYING CIVILIZATION

The controversy that exists between those who maintain that property is of natural right and those who deny it, is in the interpretation of the word property. The error of both is that for some the word property encompasses both what is legitimately subject to it, in other words the fruits of one’s work and therefore of natural right, as well as that which cannot be legitimately subject to it, in other words things created by God and donated by Him not to some people but to all; with respect to these, property is only a creation of civil law and not a natural right.

Only by establishing this distinction can both be reconciled with logic and, above all, with justice, undoing the confusion.

And, why cannot things not produced by man be legitimately the subject of property?

1. Because no one has any ownership over them, since the origin of all ownership comes from God. When it is said that it is also legitimate to own or occupy things not due to the work of man, it is only a metaphor, because the Earth cannot in reality be controlled by man, though he may, in fact, apply his work to it and exclude others from his fruits of it, not being able to take account of the res nullius as we have already seen. With the land being of natural right, the equal property of all people, all people having equal need of it for their labor and the sustenance of life, when occupying it, therefore, the individual appropriates what already has an owner, because it belongs to everyone equally.

2. Because its appropriation infringes upon the equal right of all to use, taking it from those whom it deprives, to grant to those who appropriate the Earth.

3. Because the appropriation of things not produced by man, that is natural resources, inevitably hurts others’ legitimate right of property over things produced by them, because this appropriation serves to demand from others the surrender of part of the fruits of their labor. [This is] a condition and price that allows them to use [the things], that is to work to sustain their lives, a factor that tends to expand to deprive all the unprotected of the land of all the fruits of their labor, minus the indispensible to live and create new generations (of proletari-ans) giving rise to the so-called social problem.

4. Because of its inevitable consequences, which are slavery and misery. If the appropriation of a piece of land as the exclusive property of an individual is lawful, so is that of all others, and therefore of the whole planet. Thus it would result that some men would own the planet, in which all the others would have to live, and would have the right to exclude them from the permanence and use of the planet; and the dispos-sessed, virtually and except for the violent infraction of right, would have to abandon it, intimidated, resigning themselves to death. This would create a power of life and death over the dispossessed, and would allow all and any conditions to be placed on them, as interpreted by the owners of the planet, so that they could live and prosper off the dispos-sessed. This is denying the right to life and unduly appropriating that which everyone needs to live, that is the Earth.

This lack of distinction between what is and is not legitimately subject to private property, as well as frustrating the recognition of all other natural rights, inexorably condemns the masses to misery and suffering, and obliges the use of material force 1) - of the dominators, to subdue the vanquished, and 2) - of the deprived, to rebel and regain in which all the others would have to live, and would have the right to exclude them from the permanence and use of the planet; and the dispossessed, virtually and except for the violent infraction of right, would have to abandon it, intimidated, resigning themselves to death. This would create a power of life and death over the dispossessed, and would allow all and any conditions to be placed on them, as interpreted by the owners of the planet, so that they could live and prosper off the dispossessed. This is denying the right to life and unduly appropriating that which everyone needs to live, that is the Earth.

This lack of distinction between what is and is not legitimately subject to private property, as well as frustrating the recognition of all other natural rights, inexorably condemns the masses to misery and suffering, and obliges the use of material force 1) - of the dominators, to subdue the vanquished, and 2) — of the deprived, to rebel and regain their rights. This is the current crisis of a dying civilization.

PART 22

THE CONFUSION OF LEO XIII

From this confusion came the celebrated phrase ‘the social function of property, Pope Leo XIII, by not distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate property, falls into the error of asserting that what is bought as just property, is also just property’ in defense of private property; and later Pius XI in QUADRAGESIMO ANNO, making statements that destroy the entire basis of legitimate property, leaving it at the mercy of political preponderance instead of cementing it to a principle independent of the will and the whim of men, directly linking it to moral law.

Both Pontiffs, speaking of property in general, have turned their thinking solely to the ownership of land, and property is understood not only of land as in fields, but also the ground beneath cities, the mines, expanses of water, and all natural resources.

And the expression ‘social function of property’ as it is employed is an ambiguous expression of confused thinking. Since the question of private property is the most important of all, because as long as it is not resolved, the world will remain in the hands of the few, this is the reason why I concluded that these encyclicals should be filed, because they are fascist.

PART 23

THE NEW CIVILIZATION

Since all natural rights are equal, proclaiming the ‘social function of property’ amounts to recognizing the equal right of all people to the use of land, which is the second of their natural economic rights, incompatible with the right of private property of the land.

What results from this confusion is that, in practice, the natural property rights of each of person, by the fruits of their labor, appear unethical, making it necessary to reconcile them. And from these attempts are born the various combinations and proposals of reform or construction of a new society, the approaching civilization. Summarizing and grouping these attempts, we find that reconciliation could not be reached:

⁃ Parceling [up the land] and creating as many smallholders as possible;

⁃ Giving the land to whoever works it;

⁃ Periodically dividing up the land between all members of society, conserving this property.

How to solve the clash between these two rights?

With the nationalization of land, the State assuming full ownership, the land thus passing to belong to the collective. The present owners [would] continue in the use and enjoyment, having exclusive and permanent possession, even retaining the owners’ name, being able to dispose inter vivos or mortis causa as up to now; but in reality they would be mere tenants of the nation, tenants in the form of a single tax, who would pay the nation the rent commensurate with the value of their lands, that is to say the utility which the privilege of possessing them exclusively represents. And since all improvements made by the owner are fruits of his labor and his capital, his legitimate property, the tax should be accompanied by the suppression of all taxes that reflect the improvements.

PART 24

MAN, CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

From the nationalization of the land of all countries and the abolition of all economic privileges and monopolies, the internationalization of natural resources would result de facto if not in law, thus resolving, in addition to other very important problems, the neuralgic question of raw materials. The economic space of every person, therefore, would be the whole earth, and every human being would feel and be, in fact, a citizen of the world. This doctrine is compatible with the highest degree of civilization; it could be applied without annoyance. The transformation would simply be the change of owner. The individual property of land would be merged into common ownership, in other words public property. This state of affairs would accord perfectly with moral law; all men would be equally free, the land being adjusted, occupied and cultivated, in complete subordination to the law of equal freedom for all. And so, with the abolition of all monopolies, social income would increase, and the State would have the possibility to gradually realize the ideals of socialism, which are inherent in the tendencies of the human spirit and in accordance with the invariable laws governing social development; these ideals would be fully reconciled with individual freedom. With the realization of these ideals, Peace will be a permanent blessing. Civilization will reach unimaginable heights. Humanity will rise to the culmination of Christianity and the Kingdom of God will descend upon the Earth. Such is the power of Truth and Justice.

PART 25

THE BRAZILIAN CATHOLIC APOSTOLIC CHURCH

The movement that is now underway in Brazil, with possible ramifications in other nations of the American continent and other continents, aims to centralize the person of Christ, striving for harmony and concord between all religions, granting an absolute guarantee of civil, political, philosophical and religious freedom, and not allowing any person to be probed under any pretext as to their beliefs, in order to avoid that, because of them, there may be any conditioning or limiting of any right or duty. Within the broadest educational and scientific freedom, it will provide the means for the function of thought to be harnessed and developed. It admits of divorce, within the [parameters of the] gospel. It abolishes ecclesiastical celibacy for being contrary to the laws of nature. It rejects auricular confession for being absurd. It allows priests to have a civil or military profession. All services will be conducted in the vernacular. Separating myself from the Roman Church, in order to re-establish the Church of Christ in its purity, correcting its errors, I aim to centralize the figure of Christ so that all Christians, in the true Christ, may have their model and advocate before God the Father. This is the true Christ, according to the Gospel of St John, Chapter I: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in God, and the Word was God. Through Him all things were made, and nothing that is made is made without Him. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent by God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to bear witness of the light so that all might believe through him. He was not light, but came to bear witness to the light. The true light was that which enlightens every man who comes into this world. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to what was his own, and his own received it. And he gave power to become children of God to all who did not receive him. These who believe in his name and were not born of blood or the desire of the flesh, nor of the will of man. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us; and we have seen his glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.’

The Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church is a religious society which takes its structure from the biblical teachings of the Old and New Testaments. It is Catholic because it professes the Christian faith spread throughout the world, by all Christians, considering as its brothers in Christ all those who love Christ and respect him, as God, as Man, as Philosopher. It is Apostolic because I am a true successor of the Apostles, and all acts practiced by me are valid and licit. It is Brazilian because it is national, because it detaches itself from the Roman Church, not recognizing as its Head the Head of the Roman Church, considering its Head the National Episcopate, conserving the traditional customs and practices of our land. In the whole of the national territory there will be ecclesiastical jurisdictions, called dioceses, subject to the government and administration of a diocesan Bishop, with ample powers, being able to create parishes, chaplaincies and other religious organizations in line with national legislation. The bishops will be elected by the religious communities of each diocese, confirmed by the clergy and the national episcopate, and these will be consecrated by another bishop according to the ritual adopted by the Brazilian Apostolic Catholic Church, which is the same ritual of the Roman Church with its Pontifical, so that no doubts are raised about the validity of the episcopal consecrations and the ordinations of Deacons and Priests. Bishops are autonomous in their dioceses, but consult their brothers in the episcopate, whenever there is a matter of general interest to a [particular] State or to the Nation. For matters of interest only to a [particular] State, the bishops of the State will be convoked in Council. When it is a matter of interest to the whole Nation, the National Episcopate will be convoked in Council. The Brazilian Church thus returns to the early days of Christianity. Dioceses will be governed in the spirit of the early days of Christianity, that is [in a spirit] of evangelical fraternity, all seeking to love and help each other, as it was in the beginning, forming one body with all its bishops, presbyters and deacons, in true Christian communism. The dioceses will be administered in accordance with the Constitution and Civil Code of the country, and its regulations are foreseen in its legal personality, already acquired. The ecclesiastical hierarchy is this: Deacons, Presbyters and Bishops. The Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church does not accept auricular confession because, introduced into the Church in 758 by the Eastern clergy, as it stands, auricular confession is a stimulus to immorality. It does not accept the celibacy of the clergy because this is against nature, having been prescribed by Pope Gregory VII in the year 1074.

The alternative to allowing the marriage of priests has been popes, cardinals, bishops and priests living in concubinage, fathering children everywhere. Brazil is full of the children of Missionaries. I know of colleagues of mine in the episcopate, of priests and friars who have mistresses. Hypocrites, why do you go on deceiving Humanity?

The Igreja Brasileira has no wish to fill Brazil with parasites.

Therefore, its priests must hold a civil or military position. (Already on the eighth of this month, I ordained a factory worker in São Miguel, in the state of São Paulo).

PART 26

DIVORCE

The Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church accepts divorce, within [the parameters of the gospel.

It is St Matthew who speaks to us, in Chapter 5: 27-32: “You have heard that it was said to them of old: Thou shalt not commit adultery. But I say to you, that whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart. And if thy right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. For it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body be cast into hell. And if thy right hand scandalize thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body be cast into hell. And it hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a bill of divorce. But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, excepting for the cause of fornication, maketh her to commit adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.”

And again, St Matthew, in Chapter 19: 3-9: “And there came to him the Pharisees tempting him, and saying: Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? Who answering, said to them: Have ye not read, that he who made man from the beginning, Made them male and female? And he said: For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh.

Therefore, now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. They say to him: Why then did Moses command to give a bill of divorce, and to put away? He saith to them: Because Moses by reason of the hardness of your heart permitted you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.

This is the evangelical doctrine, in its purity.

At the beginning of Christianity, in that time of transition, the woman was enslaved in all cultures, and the laws of the Jews, the Romans, and the Barbarians, all accepted repudiation or divorce. What could Christianity think? The priests of the Church, or doctors of the time, did not agree with the indissolubility of marriage.

“Some said that the New Testament was not contrary to the Law of Moses, which allowed for divorce, and that Jesus himself had accepted divorce, at least in the case of adultery by the woman.

Tertullian, St Ambrose, and St Epiphanius were of this opinion and accepted divorce. On the other hand, St Jerome, St John Chrysos-tom, and especially St Augustine, proclaimed the indissolubility of the marriage bond.

In 325 the Council of Nicaea, composed of 318 Fathers, did not object to divorce. It was precisely at this time that Fabiola repudiated her husband, guilty of adultery, and engaged in second nuptials. She had these words in her favor: It is better to marry than to burn [with passion].

And Fabiola lives on in a halo of holiness.

“Divorce is a necessity for the moralization of the Brazilian family. That which occurs with divorce, occurs with celibacy: for the lack of divorce there is a forfeit, which is the legal approval of prostitution; for lack of the marriage of priests, they live in concubinage.

PART 27

THE RELIGIOUS-POLITICAL QUESTION

After the crimes perpetrated by the Vatican in this war, it is no longer possible for the world to take seriously this organization of forgers and mystifiers who, century after century, have been lying and deceiving Humanity, from their list of popes — containing popes who never existed - to the martyrology, the calendar of saints, whose relics are peddled by the Vatican as authentic, in order to bolster popular belief. No, this cannot continue. All this belongs in the era of ‘believe or die’

(Unless the people of today want to pass into posterity with the label of those who have bequeathed us absurd tales, having lived in a time of invented saints, for the exploitation of [those who must] believe or die.)

The blood of our brethren does not permit Humanity to continue suffocated and enchained by men who represent the role of the priests of the old law, the crucifixion of Christ. Those who have been redeemed by Christ and who have redeemed us with their blood on the battlefields, victims of he who calls himself Christ’s representative on earth, do not allow us to be cowards at a time when we must restore our country. And for the restoration of the Fatherland, the religious question must be resolved. We address this question not simply as religious but as essentially political and economic, because the Roman Church ceased to be the religion of Christ when it emerged from the catacombs to transform itself into an Empire, whose monarch dominates consciences in order to more easily tyrannize Humanity with his temporal rule. It is a crime to cross our arms in indifference, delaying the march of humanity, which leads to the complete triumph of liberty. Clerical meddling in the rule of nations is no longer acceptable. Either the pope is monarch, or he is head of a religion. If, by treaty, he is considered a monarch, let him limit himself to diplomatic representation, but never go beyond the nominations of bishops; if he is the head of a religion, he must lose his diplomatic representation. Being both one thing and the other, Humanity does not accept. Choose.

And Brazil, in this electoral campaign which is now beginning, bear in mind that great paragon of our country, Rui Barbosa, when he preached: a Free Church for a Free State.

All for God. All for Christ. All for the Country.

And to the whole of Brazil, my blessing in the names of God + the Father, God + the Son, and God+ the Spirit.

São Paulo, 18 August 1945.

^[1] Jarvis translates it “Declaration to the Nation”, however Manifesto is much more prevalent and popularly understood in Churches that have descended from the greater ICAB tradition.

To understand their calling, I want to take us back a couple of weeks, because this doesn’t begin with the twelve but with Jesus himself. You will remember that at the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus enters the synagogue in Nazareth and reads from the prophet Isaiah about the one anointed by the Spirit to bring good news to the poor, liberty to captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed. And then Jesus says that in him this is being fulfilled. Jesus said, what Isaiah promised is now happening. God’s mercy is breaking into the world. The poor will hear good news. Those who are bound will experience freedom. Those who cannot see will receive sight. Those who have been pushed down will be lifted up.

Then, almost immediately, Luke begins showing us Jesus calling ordinary people to share in that mission. First Jesus announces what he has come to do, and then he begins gathering people who will participate in that work. The Twelve are not simply traveling companions. They are being called to share in the mission Jesus announced at Nazareth.

Luke first gives us the calling of Simon Peter. Peter is a fisherman. He and his companions have worked all night and caught nothing. Jesus tells them to lower the nets once more, and suddenly they catch so many fish that the nets begin to break. Peter falls before Jesus and confesses that he is a sinful man. Peter, like so many of us, looks at himself and sees his unworthiness. But Jesus looks at Peter and sees his vocation. Peter sees his weakness; Jesus sees what grace can make of him. Jesus tells him not to be afraid and gives him a new mission. Jesus does not wait until Peter is perfect before calling him.

Then Luke brings us to the formal choosing of the Twelve. Before Jesus chooses them, he goes up the mountain and spends the whole night in prayer to God. Only when morning comes does he call his disciples, choose twelve from among them, and name them apostles. Luke wants us to notice that their calling arises from Jesus’ prayerful communion with the Father. Jesus does not choose carelessly. He prays, he discerns, and he chooses. And the number twelve is important. It would have reminded Israel of the twelve tribes. Jesus is giving a sign that God is gathering and renewing his people.

But look at whom Jesus chooses. Peter, Andrew, James, and John come from the world of fishing. These are working men. They know boats, nets, long nights, hard labor, good catches, and bad catches. They are not introduced as powerful men or members of the religious elite. Jesus walks into ordinary life and says, “Follow me” . God does not call only extraordinary people. He calls ordinary people in the middle of ordinary life.

Then there is Matthew. Matthew’s Gospel identifies him as “Matthew the tax collector”. That would have shocked some people. Tax collectors were connected with the Roman system of taxation and could be deeply resented by their fellow Jews. People might have looked at Matthew and asked, “Why would Jesus want someone like him?” Yet Jesus approaches Matthew at his tax booth and says, “Follow me,” and Matthew gets up and follows him. Jesus sees something in Matthew that others do not see.

Then Luke names Simon, whom he calls “the Zealot” . We should not claim more than Scripture tells us about Simon’s political background, but his nickname at least suggests that he was remembered as a man of zeal, if not a revolutionary. Now imagine Simon and Matthew sitting at the same table. Matthew had worked within the Roman taxation system. Simon carried this very different identity. These are not necessarily two men we would expect to choose one another as companions. Yet Jesus chooses both. Jesus does not gather twelve copies of the same person. He gathers different people and places himself at the center of their lives.

Mark adds another memorable detail. Jesus gives James and John the nickname “Sons of Thunder” . Later, they will ask for positions of honor, and Jesus will have to teach them what true greatness means. Thomas will struggle to believe the testimony about the Resurrection. Peter will deny Jesus three times. Judas Iscariot will betray him. Jesus knew the people he was calling. He did not choose them because they had no weaknesses. He chose them because he intended to form and transform them.

Mark also gives us one of the most important details of the calling. He tells us that Jesus appointed the Twelve first “to be with him” and then to be sent out to proclaim the message (Mark 3:14). Notice the order. Before they can go for Jesus, they must be with Jesus. Before mission comes friendship. Before preaching comes listening. Before doing something for Christ comes being with Christ. That remains true for us. We cannot give the world a Christ whom we ourselves do not know. That is why we pray, listen to Scripture, come to Mass, and receive Christ in the Eucharist. Our mission begins by being with him.

Matthew adds another dimension. Just before Jesus calls and commissions the Twelve, Matthew tells us that Jesus looks upon the crowds and is moved with compassion because they are harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus then says that the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. Immediately afterward, he summons the Twelve and gives them authority to participate in his work. This explains why Jesus calls people. The calling is not simply for the benefit of the one being called. Jesus calls because he sees people who are hurting. He sees the lonely, the poor, the sick, the lost, and those who need mercy, hope, healing, forgiveness, and someone willing to walk beside them.

John tells the story of the beginning of discipleship differently. John does not narrate the formal appointment of the Twelve as Luke, Mark, and Matthew do. Instead, John shows us one person meeting Jesus and then bringing another person to him. Andrew encounters Jesus, then goes to find his brother Simon and brings him to Jesus. Jesus calls Philip, and Philip goes looking for Nathanael. Nathanael is skeptical and wonders whether anything good can come from Nazareth. Philip does not give him a long argument. He simply says, “Come and see”.

So when we place the Gospels together, we see a beautiful picture. Luke tells us that Jesus first announces the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise and later chooses the Twelve after a night of prayer. Mark reminds us that they are called first to be with Jesus before being sent by him. Matthew shows us that their calling flows from Jesus’ compassion for people who are hurting (Matthew 9:36–10:1). John shows us disciples encountering Jesus personally and then inviting others with those simple words, “Come and see”.

And perhaps most striking of all is whom Jesus chooses to share that mission: fishermen, a tax collector, Simon the Zealot, Sons of Thunder, a Thomas who will question, a Peter who will fail, and men whose occupations we do not even know. If we had been standing there when Jesus announced his choices, we might have asked, “Lord, are these really the people through whom you intend to change the world?” And Jesus’ answer would have been yes.

That is also a lesson about the Church. The Church is not meant to be a gathering of people who are all alike. We come from different families, cultures, occupations, generations, personalities, and life experiences. There may even be people sitting in the same parish who, apart from Jesus Christ, would never have chosen one another. But that is precisely the point. The center of the Twelve was not their similarity. The center was Jesus. And the center of the Church must still be Jesus.

So when you think, “God could not possibly use me,” remember the Twelve. If you think you are too ordinary, remember the fishermen. If you have a past you wish were different, remember Matthew. If you have a strong personality, remember James and John. If you struggle with questions, remember Thomas. If you have failed the Lord, remember Peter. Jesus is not looking for flawless people. He calls real people and, through grace, forms them into disciples.

The mission Jesus announced in Nazareth is still the mission of his Church. There are still people who need good news. There are still people trapped by addiction, despair, loneliness, fear, injustice, and sin who long for freedom. There are still people who feel forgotten and people waiting for someone to show them the mercy of Christ and simply say, “Come and see”.

So remember, Jesus did not choose the Twelve because they had the perfect background. He chose them so that they could be with him, be transformed by him, and be sent by him. The same Christ who announced, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled” (Luke 4:21), still calls ordinary people to share his extraordinary mission. The mission announced in Nazareth passed to the Twelve, passed through the Church, and has now reached you and me. Christ still calls us to be with him, to allow him to change us, to walk beside people who may be very different from us, and then to carry his mercy into the world. The question is whether we will hear his voice, trust his choice, and follow. Amen.

We have seen violence recorded before. We have watched human beings beaten, suffocated, shot, dragged from cars, separated from children, thrown against pavement, and disappeared behind detention-center walls, and sometimes we have watched the footage afterward from several different angles. The problem has never simply been that empire lacked witnesses; the problem is that empire so often believes it has the right to do what the witnesses see.

A body camera may preserve evidence, expose a lie, or serve as a small instrument in the struggle for accountability, but no camera can make an unjust structure just. No lens can convert domination into compassion, and no recording device can sanctify an institution simply because its violence has become observable. The state does not become righteous simply by recording itself, especially when those who do the recording remain protected from meaningful consequences.

And now we are confronted with another possibility: electricity placed quite literally into the hands of the agents of the state. If these shock gloves are indeed being considered for use against exposed human skin, then we should sit with the terrible symbolism of that development and ask what kind of society imagines electrified touch as yet another ordinary instrument of enforcement.

The human hand is one of our oldest symbols of relationship. We reach toward one another with our hands, hold children with them, prepare food, wash wounds, build homes, bless bodies, bury our dead, clasp the hands of the grieving, raise fists in protest, and extend open palms toward strangers. Scripture speaks again and again of hands that heal, feed, lift up, restore, and bless, yet time and time again, empire imagines another possibility for the hand: make it hurt, make touch itself a threat, and give the hand enough electricity that another human being learns to fear being reached for.

It is simply another instrument added to an already overflowing arsenal of domination. Guns, restraints, riot shields, chemical agents, tear gas, drones, surveillance systems, detention centers, armored vehicles, databases, and perhaps now electricity carried against the skin all belong to the same imagination. Every generation of empire invents new machinery and then tells us that the machinery is necessary for our safety, but as a student of liberation theology I believe that we must ask the questions empire desperately wants us to forget: whose safety is being protected, whose security is being defended, and whose bodies must be frightened, confined, shocked, deported, impoverished, or killed so that somebody else may continue calling this arrangement peace?

There is a false peace that depends upon frightened people remaining silent, just as there is an order that exists only because those beneath it have been taught that resistance will cost them everything. There is also a version of national security that functions as an idol, demanding sacrifice after sacrifice while assuring us that the victims deserved their place upon the altar. When security becomes sacred while human beings become expendable, we are no longer talking about public safety; we are talking about worship, and the god being worshiped is power.

This is why fear has always been one of empire’s favorite liturgies: it isolates people who might otherwise discover their common struggle. Fear convinces the immigrant that the citizen is not their neighbor, teaches the housed person to regard the unhoused person as the problem, tells the working poor to resent someone even poorer, and encourages white people to misunderstand Black liberation as a threat rather than an invitation into a more human future. Fear turns queer and trans bodies into political abstractions rather than beloved human beings, reduces the addicted person to a moral failure rather than recognizing a human being whose suffering places a claim upon our compassion, and divides the very people who might otherwise recognize that their wounds have been produced by interconnected systems.

Empire understands something that we sometimes forget, which is that there are more of us than there are of them. But empire also understands that numbers mean very little when those numbers are frightened, isolated, suspicious of one another, exhausted, and convinced that survival is an individual project.

Growing up, many of us were taught to believe another story about this nation. We were taught to be proud, given flags and pledges and carefully edited histories, and told that this place represented some extraordinary ideal in which certain rights were self-evident, liberty belonged to us, and every person possessed some sacred right to pursue happiness. Perhaps some of us believed it because privilege allowed us the luxury of believing it, and perhaps we mistook our relative insulation from the machinery for evidence that the machinery did not exist.

Then something happened: a window cracked, and after that another, until the whole stained-glass mythology began falling around us. Every new cruelty seemed to shatter another piece of those rose-tinted glasses, until we were forced to confront the possibility that what we had been taught was not simply incomplete but constructed to keep certain truths beyond our field of vision.

We must tell the truth here, however, because what feels like revelation to some of us is ancient knowledge to others. Our Black siblings have been telling this truth for centuries; Indigenous peoples knew it before this nation had finished naming itself, and our queer and trans siblings have long understood what happens when governments and religious institutions decide that certain bodies are dangerous simply for existing. Immigrants know, the poor know, the unhoused know, the incarcerated know, disabled people know, those living with addiction know, and those whose neighborhoods have always been overpoliced and underfunded know.

What many people are experiencing today as a terrifying rupture is, for millions of others, simply the machinery becoming visible to people who previously had the privilege of looking elsewhere. The apocalypse is not only an end but also an unveiling, a pulling back of the curtain so that what has been hidden can finally be seen. In this instance, it is the end of the insulated world that so many of us have lived in. Perhaps this is one of the terrible graces of this moment: the machinery is becoming harder to ignore, and therefore our moral responsibility is becoming harder to evade. And this is especially uncomfortable for those who have always seen themselves as on the right side of history, rather than passively compliant with the status quo.

But I beg you not just to sit in the shock of the discomfort some of you may be experiencing in that growing awareness. Instead, we must ask: what will we do now that we have seen it? Because Christianity has never merely commanded us to have eyes to see and ears to hear. Seeing is only the beginning, and awareness without movement eventually becomes another form of spectatorship in which we consume the suffering of others while congratulating ourselves for recognizing that suffering exists.

The prophets did not merely perceive injustice; they named it, confronted it, and announced judgment against the systems that produced it. Jesus did not merely notice suffering around him; he crossed boundaries toward those who suffered, touched bodies regarded as unclean, ate with people respectable society despised, challenged religious authorities who placed law above life, and proclaimed good news that threatened those whose comfort depended upon the suffering of others. The early Christian communities likewise did not merely announce another world but attempted, however imperfectly, to embody one by sharing possessions, feeding one another, crossing social boundaries, caring for vulnerable people, and creating community among those whom the surrounding order insisted should remain separated.

Faithfulness therefore requires more than awareness, because liberation theology has always insisted that reflection without praxis becomes sterile. It requires organization, accompaniment, mutual aid, sanctuary, protection of the vulnerable, and the construction of networks of care that are durable enough to withstand repression and broad enough to refuse the divisions imposed on us by the powerful. If our theology cannot become food, shelter, protection, solidarity, courage, and organized resistance when human beings are being crushed, then we must ask whether what we possess is theology at all or simply religious vocabulary wrapped around our unwillingness to risk anything.

This work will mean standing beside people we were taught not to understand, and it will mean discovering kinship where capitalism, racism, nationalism, patriarchy, ableism, heteronormativity, and religious fundamentalism told us there could only be suspicion. It will require uncomfortable coalitions and relationships with people whose language is different from ours, whose theology is different, whose politics are imperfect, and whose histories we do not entirely understand. That discomfort should not frighten us, because liberation has never depended upon the oppressed achieving ideological purity before recognizing one another.

Liberation begins when we hear somebody else’s cry and understand that their liberation and ours have somehow become entangled. It begins when the citizen understands that the immigrant’s terror diminishes their own humanity, when the housed person understands that homelessness indicts the whole community, when white Christians understand that there can be no resurrection without confronting the crosses erected by white supremacy, and when churches learn that neutrality between the crucified and the crucifier is not neutrality at all.

This is what empire fears far more than any individual protest, because outrage can be exhausted, viral moments disappear, and isolated acts of courage can be contained. Empire has prisons designed for heroes, news cycles capable of swallowing atrocities, bureaucracies capable of waiting for public anger to fade, and entire industries devoted to convincing exhausted people that nothing they do will matter. What empire has always had more difficulty defeating is sustained solidarity that becomes ordinary, disciplined, and deeply rooted in community.

It fears people feeding one another, housing one another, warning one another, documenting together, refusing cooperation with cruelty, and refusing to surrender their neighbors to the machinery. It fears workers discovering their power, congregations becoming sanctuaries rather than chaplaincies for the status quo, neighborhoods developing networks of protection and care, and communities learning they can survive without waiting for permission from institutions that have already abandoned them. It fears resistance becoming not a moment of spectacular outrage but a way of life.

That kind of resistance cannot depend entirely on adrenaline, because adrenaline eventually wears off and the struggle for liberation lasts longer than any news cycle. Sustainable resistance needs kitchens and carpools, childcare and legal defense, prayer and protest, bail funds and neighborhood networks, artists and organizers, clergy and atheists, elders who remember previous struggles and young people who refuse to accept the inevitability of what they inherited. It needs rest as well as marches, grief as well as courage, relationships as well as rhetoric, because a movement incapable of caring for its people eventually reproduces the disposability it claims to oppose.

We will need one another, and that is not sentimental language but strategy. For those of us who still dare speak the name of Jesus, it is also theology, because the God revealed among the crucified peoples of history is not neutral between the cross and those who construct crosses. God is encountered among those struggling to come down from them and among those willing to risk their lives to help pull the nails from their neighbors' bodies.

Empire may continue building its arsenal, polishing its shields, multiplying its cameras, expanding its surveillance, strengthening its walls, and perhaps even electrifying the hands of those entrusted with enforcement. It may continue telling us that cruelty is security, that obedience is peace, that domination is order, and that frightened communities are simply the necessary price of protecting the nation, but none of that changes the work placed before us.

Our task is to see clearly and hear the cries that empire asks us to ignore, but it is also to remember, organize, protect one another, and refuse the isolation upon which domination depends. We must stubbornly and collectively construct the world that empire insists cannot exist, not because history guarantees our victory, but because refusing death-dealing systems and building communities capable of life is itself part of what it means to be human.

There really are more of us, but numbers alone will not save us because a crowd is not yet a people. We must become a people capable of enduring, a people capable of resisting without becoming what we oppose, a people capable of mourning and organizing at the same time, and a people who understand that hope is not the expectation that everything will somehow work out but the decision to act together when there is no guarantee that it will.

Jon Sobrino has taught me that this is the kind of hope we ought to demand, because resurrection is not cheap optimism and it never asks us to pretend that crucifixion did not happen. The risen Christ still bears wounds, and resurrection therefore does not erase the violence of history but declares that violence does not possess the authority to determine history’s final meaning. Empire may wound, imprison, terrorize, deport, surveil, and kill, but Christians should know better than anyone that the existence of a cross does not mean Caesar has won.

The task before us, then, is not simply to survive until the machinery becomes kinder. It is to become the kind of people whose solidarity makes another world imaginable, whose resistance makes domination more difficult, and whose love is organized strongly enough to protect those whom empire has decided are disposable. We need eyes to see and ears to hear, certainly, but we also need hands willing to build, feet willing to march, bodies willing to stand beside one another, communities willing to endure, and a hope stubborn enough to keep working until something finally breaks through.

The resurrection does not erase the wounds of crucifixion, but it announces that crucifixion will not have the final word. Neither will empire, provided that we refuse to surrender our neighbors, refuse the comfort of indifference, and learn at last how to become a people together.

J-M

Evangelical Catholic Church

8/13/26