JUC in Brazil LAH 6915 Johnson rgh drft JWH 1/20/2020

The Catholic University Student Movement in Brazil: 1946 to 1966

Introduction

This paper will address the complex and problematic relationship between

religion and politics in Brazilian Catholicism of the Cold War era. This ambivalent

relationship was particularly acute among Catholic university student movements at the

end of the1950s and the first half of the 1960s. The problem of religion and politics, as

illustrated in Brazilian Catholic Action in general, and the Catholic university student

movement in Brazil, JUC (Juventude Universidade Católica) in particular, was an

attempt to resolve the tension between the sacred and the secular, an especially profound

challenge in traditionally Catholic societies entering into an increasingly secularized

modernity.1 I will argue that JUC was a victim of its own success in transcending the

dualistic “sacred-secular” division between religion and politics from 1946 to 1963 and

was therefore firmly repressed by the Brazilian military dictatorship after 1964 and was

subsequently dissolved by the Brazilian Catholic church hierarchy in 1966.

With the slow, painful and often violent demise of Catholic Christendom in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pressing challenges that faced the Catholic Church

hierarchy, both national and transnational.2 Some of these challenges led to the following
1
Emile Poulat, “Catholicism and Modernity: A Process of Mutual Exclusion,” in The
Debate on Modernity, ed. Claude Geffré and Jean-Pierre Jossua (London: SCM Press,
1992), 11. Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway, in Political Catholicism in Europe,
1918–1965 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), believe that Catholicism reached the peak
of its political influence in the early twentieth century in the Catholic countries of Europe
(France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Belgium) through conservative Catholic integralism
and subsequently resisted Liberal, Socialist and Communist parties as well as
Protestantism until the growing advent of pluralism and consumerism and Vatican II in
the 1960s.
2
For an overview of the struggle between Catholicism and modernity in nineteenth
century Europe see Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-
Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 21, 28.

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questions: How does the church bring spiritual values into the political sphere without a)

imposing the sacred upon the temporal, or b) becoming politicized and allowing the

temporal to impose itself upon the sacred?3

The twentieth-century popes, particularly Pius XI and Pius XII, attempted to re-

engage increasingly desacralized spheres of society through the activity of Catholic lay-

persons in the umbrella movement called Catholic Action. Catholic Action began in Italy

in the mid-1920s, partly as a response to the pressures of the mobilization of mass

ideological movements such as Mussolini’s Italian fascism, as well as anarchists and the

various socialist and communist mass organizations.4 Catholic Action was the church’s

attempt to respond to the competitive ideological market place of the interwar period in

Europe; roughly from 1922 through the beginning of World War Two. The foundational

concept of Catholic Action was that Catholic lay people --women, men and youth – were

to be trained and equipped to participate in the apostolic mandate of the bishops of the

church.5 These lay ‘missionaries’ would disseminate Catholic values in their respective
3
To see how Protestantism and Catholicism responded differently to the challenge of
modernity, see Christoph Theobald. “Attempts at Reconciling Modernity and Religion in
Catholic and Protestant Theology.” In The Debate on Modernity, edited by Claude Geffré
and Jean-Pierre Jossua, 27, 31. London: SCM Press, 1992.
4
Arthur Alonso, Catholic Action and the Laity, trans. Cornelius J. Crowley (St. Louis: B.
Herder Book Co., 1961), 1. For Pius XI’s definition of the purpose of Catholic Action,
see Fortunato Bedoya Franco, Un Social Amanecer (Medellín: Editorial Carpel-Antorcha,
1966), 46; Scott Mainwaring, The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil, 1916–1985
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 118.

5
The concept ‘apostolic’ or ‘the apostolate’ is used in Catholicism to refer to the
missionary responsibility of the Church, particularly the bishops, to expand the
boundaries of the faith and to communicate the message and values of Catholicism to
non-Christian groups. It is taken from the Greek, α π ο σ τ ο λ ο σ , meaning “sent
with a mission.”

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secular spheres.6 Young Catholic workers would be mobilized to be missionaries to

young working-class youths; young Catholic rural peasants would be trained to be

effective missionaries to rural peasant youth, women would be missionaries to other

women and men to men. Along these same lines, young Catholic students, at the

secondary as well as at the university level, were to be mobilized and formed into militant

missionaries of Catholicism in secular educational institutions. This later task took on

greater urgency as the Catholic Church increasingly ceded control of education to the

state. One might say that Catholic Action represented a grass-roots strategy of projecting

the influence of Catholic values into society from the base, rather than imposing them

from above through the agency of the state.

In the postwar era, particularly in Brazil, Catholic Action began to be heavily

influenced by new approaches to the lay apostolate from Belgium, France and Franco-

phone Canada.7 Specialized Catholic Action was organized around the apostolic mission

and was more militant and focused than the generalized Italian model of Catholic Action

which tended to be organized and controlled largely at the parish and diocesan levels by

the bishops. The original model for the newer specialized approach was developed by

Father Joseph Cardijn, a Belgium worker-priest who in 1924 founded JOC (Jeunesse

Oeuvrière Chrétienne) which was then approved by Pope Pius XI in 1925. Cardijn

originated many of the practices that were later implemented in the university and student

6
In Portuguese this was expressed as “apostolat no meio.” It does not easily translate into
English. It means mission work within the social sphere or the secular medium or
environment as opposed to from within the sacred space or within the church.
7
The concept of lay people with Catholicism refers to non-ordained members from the
Greek laos (people).The “Lay apostolate” was the missionary responsibility of ordinary
members of the Catholic Church in the attempt to mobilize lay people (non-clerical) to
act as faithful Catholics within secular and civil society.

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movements, such as the see-judge-act method, also called the revision of life of personal,

spiritual and politico-intellectual formation which will be discussed later.8

In Spanish America, universities were shaken by the University Reform

movement which originated in the University of Córdoba in Argentina in 1918. This

university reform was led by students from the emerging middle-class which was

beginning to participate more actively in the society and the university.9 Middle class

students saw higher education as one of the few means to a new social status and as

necessary step toward assuring economic and social security.

Unlike Spanish America, which had universities from an early date in the colonial

period, the history of university education in Brazil was quite different. Portuguse

Imperial authorities preferred to bring young Brazilians to study in Coimbra in Portugal.

During the Empire and the Old Republic, apart from some isolated schools of law or

medicine there was no university in Brazil as such.10 In Brazil, only 78 schools had been

8
For more information about the Young Workers Movement see Oscar Cole-Arnal.
“Shaping Young Proletarians Into Militant Christians: The Pioneer Phase of the JOC in
France and Quebec.” Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 4 (October 1997): 509-
26 ; Robert Dumont. Memoires d’un Pretre-Ouvrier : Regards sur l’Eglise et le Monde.
Paris: Karthala, 2006 ; Jose Aparecido Gomes Moreira. “Para una Historia de la Juventud
Obrera Catolica (1959-1985).” Mexicana de Sociología 49, no. 3 (September 1987): 205-
20; Scot Mainwarring. “A JOC e o Surgimento da Igreja Na Base, 1958-1970.” Revista
Ecclesiástica Brasileira 43, no. 169 (March 1983): 29-92 and Mark and Louise Zwick.
“Roots of the Catholic Worker Movement: Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, and the
Catholic Worker Movement.” Houston Catholic Worker, July-August 1999; Indre
Cuplinskas, “Guns and Rosaries: The Use of Military Imagery in the French-Canadian
Catholic Student Newspaper JEC,” Historical Studies 71 (2005): 14. For an example of
the process of transition from generalized to specialized Catholic Action see Francisco
García Piñero. “La Especialización Obrera en la Acción Católica Española.” ARBIL 88.
Http://www.arbil.org/(88)hoac.htm.
9
Richard J. Walter, “The Intellectual Background of the 1918 University Reform in
Argentina,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49.2 (May 1969): 233-6.

10
Luiz Alberto Gómez de Souza, A JUC: Os Estudantes Católicos e a Política
(Petrópolis: Vozes, 1984), 74.

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created before 1930. The number rose to 338 in 1960. After World War II the number of

students in Brazilian universities began to rise rapidly. The student population had

doubled by 1950. The growth in student population again accelerated after 1963.

UNIVERSITY ATTENDANCE (1950-70) 0

Years Total Students Annual Growth

(1,000) (%)
1950 52.6
1951 58.8 11.8
1952 66.6 13.3
1953 67.5 1.3
1954 61.4 -9
1955 72.6 18.2
1956 78.6 8.3
1957 79.5 1.1
1958 84.5 6.2
1959 89.6 6
1960 93.2 4
1961 98.9 6.1
1962 107.3 8.5
1963 124.2 15.8
1964 142.4 14.6
1965 155.8 9.4
1966 180.1 15.6
1967 212.9 18.2
1968 278.3 30.7
1969 342.8 23.2
1970 425.5 24.1
Source: Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture
as cited in Souza, 1984:75.

From a quantitative point of view, the number of students involved in the student

movements, was never very large compared to the whole population of Brazil.

Nevertheless, student movements, Liberal, conservative and Marxist as well as Catholic,

had an influence far beyond their numbers in Brazilian society in the postwar period.11

The first National Congress of Students took place in Brazil in 1937 and was

considered the beginning of the National Union of Students (UNE – União Nacional dos

Estudantes). The date coincided with the political coup of Getúlio Vargas which
11
Souza:76.

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dissolved parliament and created the authoritarian and corporatist Estado Novo. There

were nearly eighty university associations represented in the first student congress.12

After World War II, the Brazilian National Student Union paralleled the development of

student unions in numerous other European (both Western and Eastern block) countries

and the formation of an international umbrella student union in Europe called the

International Union of Students (IUS) with national chapters in 62 nations.13

Contemporaneous with these significant changes in Brazilian education and

Catholicism was the rise of the postwar phenomenon of international youth culture. The

appearance of a new category of youth as an intermediate stage between childhood and

adulthood, with its own subculture has been well documented elsewhere and has

developed its own disciplinary history.14 Some of these historical works have examined

specific aspects of the developing youth culture in the context of modernity and global

capitalism. Other histories of childhood and youth have examined working-class issues,

12
Souza:81
13
Phillip Altbach, 1970. The International Student Movement. Journal of Contemporary
History 5(1, Generations in Conflict):160.
14
Phillippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert
Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962). Histories of children in a variety of countries, have
been carried out, see Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood
(London and Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004); Bianca Premo, Children of the Father
King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2005), and, “How Latin America’s History of
Childhood Came of Age,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1.1 (Jan
2008); Anja Muller, ed., Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and
Identity, Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present; Catriona Kelly, Children’s
World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007);
Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York:
Columbia UP, 1995); Ximena Pachón C. and Cecilia Muñoz, La Niñez en el Siglo XX :
Comienzos de Siglo (Bogotá, Colombia: Planeta, 1991); Claudia Nelson and Lynne
Vallone, The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915
(Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1994).

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or leftist literature with regards to children.15 Sociologists and historians of childhood

generally agree that there was a unique emergence of youth culture after World War II

due to the convergence of the lengthening of the period of youth (defined by dependence

on parents) and the increasing affluence of youth and their new role as consumers in

capitalist society.

The appearance of the new youth culture was accompanied by the growth of

secondary and university education and the development of student movements with

political agency. Immediately after the end of World War II, international student unions

were created in Prague, and soon after in London, and became the site of fierce

ideological contestation between the Eastern block and the West in the Cold War.16

After World War Two, Brazilian student movements began to refocus on social

problems with by mobilizing against fascism, and later, against the Estado Novo of

Getúlio Vargas in a struggle to democratize the country along the side of liberals and the

left. From 1947 until 1950 the leadership of university movements was in the hands of

15
Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith, Designing Modern Childhoods: History,
Space, and the Material Culture of Children, The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 2008). David Thomas Cook, The Commodification
of Childhood, The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer
(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004). Julia Mickenberg. Learning from the Left: Children’s
Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States. Oxford and New
York: Oxford UP, 2006; Laura Lee Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-
Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880–1960 (Durham and
London: Duke UP, 2002). Carolyn Kay Steedman provides a particularly interesting
approach to examining individual subjectivity and working class childhood over two
generations in Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick,
New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1997).
16
Philip G. Altbach, “The International Student Movement,” Journal of Contemporary
History 5, no. 1, Generations in Conflict (1970): 161; Joseph W. Holbrook, “Between a
Rock and a Hard Place, International Catholic Student Movements, 1946 to 1966,”
research rept. (Florida International University, Miami, 2009), 8.

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the Brazilian Socialist Party, created by non-communist intellectuals. After 1950 the

União Nacional dos Estudantes fell under the influence of the right-wing of the student

movement.17

In the XIX Congress of UNE in 1956, the progressive student sectors permanently

regained control of the student union. This initiated a process of increasing politicization

and a mobilization against the presence of foreign corporations. Similar to the IUS in

Europe, the Brazilian UNE assumed increasingly radical nationalist anti-imperialist

positions. By the early 1960s, there was an increasingly radicalized political environment

in Brazil that also affected the university student movements including the Catholics. A

national seminar of UNE held in Salvador de Bahia in 1961 resulted in a declaration

about University Reform that spoke of the need of “revolution understood as a conscious

position of an entire people in favor of socio-political change.”18 Also in this same period

progressive Catholic students came to prominence within the larger university movement

with the election of a former leader of the Catholic University movement to the

presidency of UNE. From this point on, UNE presidents would mostly be comprised of

left Catholic student leaders from JUC.

The Catholic Student Movement

The Catholic student movement in Brazil arose within the context of Catholic

Action in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Catholic Action in Brazil began in 1934 and the

Catholic student movement, Juventude Universitaria Catolica, (JUC) began soon after in

1937.19 This early form of the Catholic university student movement was cast in the mold
17
Souza:82.
18
Souza:83.
19
Dom Cândido Padim, cassette tape recording F21, Historia Oral, Centro de
Documentação e Informação Científica (São Paulo, Brazil: Pontíficia Universidade

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of the generalized Italian model of Catholic Action with its focus on the parishes and

diocesan structure and the organization into four branches of lay people by gender and

age: adult women and men, young women and young men.20 JUC was initially part of the

Catholic Action Young Men’s (JAC – Juventude Accão Católica masculina) branch.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Catholic student movement had a variety of

influences, both conservative and progressive. The conservative element which was

traditional and integralist began to lose influence during the war, eventually leaving

Catholic Action. New organizational statutes were formulated in 1947 in São Paulo at a

National Week of JUC (Semana Nacional da JUC). Although these new statutes were

still based on the generalized Italian model, they specifically permitted the introduction

of experiences from France, Belgium, Canada, and the United States.21

Several French Canadian priests arrived in Brazil with previous experience in

specialized Catholic Action’s work with students.22 There were also several Brazilian

priests who studied in France and had been involved in the older Brazilian student

organizations before the War, among which was a Dominican, Frei Romeu Dale, who was

to be a key figure in the development of JUC and who served as the national advisor of

JUC from 1949 through 1961.

Católica de São Paulo, 1990), side A, #100.

20
The Specialized Franco-Belgian model of Catholic Action, which became more
predominant after WWII, divided ‘militants’ by class of origin and profession, and
occasionally by gender into the i-e-o-a-u formation: JIC (Young Independent Catholics),
JEC (Young Catholic Secondary Students), JOC (Young Catholic Workers), JAC (Young
Catholic Agriculturalists), and JUC (Young Catholic University students) and was less
controlled by the bishops and more of a sodality in its organizational model.
21
Souza:96.
22
Romeu Dale, Interview with Olga Brites and Yara Aun Khoury, cass. recording JUC
F14 and F15, Historia Oral, Centro de Documentação e Informação Científica (São
Paulo, Brazil: Pontíficia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, April, 13, 1993) Side B.

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From the beginning Frei Dale was in favor of mentoring students through active

personal engagement with real social issues which he called “formation in action.” Dale’s

own leadership style was nuanced and affirming of young people, giving them plenty of

room for their own initiatives. Those that worked with him remember his attempt to

always arrive at incisive positions, frequently provoking strong reactions among young

leaders in order to stimulate discussion and thinking about possible new directions.23

In 1948, three Brazilian students, one male and two female attended the first

meeting in Chicago of what was later to be known as JECI, Jeunesse Etudiant,

Catholique International, an international coordinating group for Catholic students based

in Paris. The following year two students from Brazil were send to the Congress of Pax

Romana in Mexico.24 Throughout the 1950s, numerous Brazilian students were provided

with opportunities to travel to attend Congresses and conferences in Europe, Africa and

other parts of Central and South America.25 The Brazilian chapter of the Catholic

University Youth (JUC) formed a National Coordinating group in 1950. The Catholic

student’s movement also became an international movement in 1950 with headquarters in

Paris and formed a Latin American secretariat for JUC and JEC26 (the Catholic secondary

student organization), initially located in Lima Peru. The headquarters for Latin American
23
Dale, 1993, Side B; Souza:89 and 94.
24
Pax Romana and JECI were both Catholic international coordinating centers for student
movements with slightly different goals which sometimes brought them into conflict. Pax
Romana began in 1921 in the context of Italy and Spain and was influenced by Jacques
Maritain’s vision of neo-Christendom. JECI began in Paris after World War II in the
context of the allied countries of Canada, France, Belgium and the United States and was
influenced by Emmanuel Mounier’s personalist philosophy of action. The two
organizations were merged into one international coordinating agency in the late 1960s.
25
José Oscar Beozzo, Cristãos Na Universidade e Na Política (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes,
1984), 36, 54-55.
26
JEC stands for Juventude Estudiante Catolica in Portuguese, or Jeunesse Etudient
Catolique in French and was the secondary school version of JUC. Secondary students in
JEC often moved on to JUC when they entered university studies.

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was later was moved to Quito, Ecuador, because of political instability in Peru. By the

end of the 1950s, a Brazilian student leader, Luis Alberto Gomez de Sousa, eventually

rose to the position of President of JECI, the Paris based International Secretariat.27

According to Gómez de Souza, in some cities JUC and JUCF (The women’s

student organization before they were merged) were primarily centers of religious and

spiritual formation in the mid-1950s; in others, especially São Paulo, they were being

transformed into movements which sought to act forthrightly in spheres of secular life

(meios da vida).

According to an interview with a former member of JUC, Luis Edwardo

Waldemarin Wanderly, in the early 1950s the majority of JUC members focused on the

internal workings of the church and even as late as 1955, there were only a few student

members that were becoming politically radical. Nevertheless, Wanderly adds that by

1958 and 1959, the pressure become politically engaged was began to intensify.28

There were 60 ‘base’ teams of JUC working in over one hundred faculties in

sixteen universities of Brazil in 1953. Soon, meetings of JUC began to include the “social

question” although only in a cursory way. There was also a move toward regional

decentralization. By the following year, the student leaders of JUC were asking the

clerical advisors for guidance on the issue of political engagement.29 The first Regional

Encounter of the student organizations in the Southern Cone countries took place in 1954

in Asunción, Paraguay. This same year the International Council in Paris was re-

structured and renamed itself JEC International (JECI) and published a document called

27
Padim, cassette tape recording F22, (1990), side B, #350.
28
Luis Edwardo Waldemarin Wanderly, São Paulo: Universidade Pontificia Católica,
CEDIC, September 27, 1988. Interview.
29
Beozzo:38-40.

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“Common Foundations” (Bases Comuns) detailing the common values and practices of the

various Catholic university student organizations within its sphere of influence.30 From this point

on, Brazilian JUC began to work less with Pax Romana and more closely with JECI in Paris.31

In 1956, it was decided to give the greater responsibility for developing an annual

“program” to the regional centers such as São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and at the national

level to focus rather on the development of a consensus of shared values as a unifying

factor for the National Movement. There was a new emphasis on careful analysis of

secular social sphere of the students (o conhecimento do meio). This was followed by

discussion of uniquely Brazilian problems such as nationalism, education, worker’s

issues, university politics, Christian responsibility and the challenge of how to

successfully integrate new members into the values and ethos of the movement. This

challenge of integrating new members coincided with the accelerating growth of the

Catholic student movement. Also in 1956, the Brazilian JUC hosted an International

Session of JECI in Rio de Janeiro which included discussion of the “Common Basis” of

the Catholic university movement under the leadership of Frei Romeu Dale.32

A good illustration of the perennial dilemma of balancing the tension between

religion and politics is found in the 1957 national bulletin for JUC. There is an article

called “JUC and University Politics” which talks about the importance of “incarnating

into the faculty environment” in order to share Christian (Catholic) values in the secular

30
Jean-Louis Janot, memorandum of the General Secretary of JECI to the Director of Pax
Romana, Bidegain Papers, Caja 2a, Folder A - JECI Correspondence (Miami: Florida
International University, Department of Religion, 1956) 1; JECI, “Bulletin International,”
Bidegain Papers, Caja 2a JEC International, Folder C 1946–1956 Boletines JEC (Miami:
Florida International University, Department of Religion, 1956) 3.
31
Beozzo:55.
32
Beozzo:55.

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sphere. 33 According to the author of the article, it was through JUC that the “militant”

Catholic student ought to discover the possibility of acting (engaging) politically in the

university and where he should receive the supernatural motivation for doing so. It was

also in JUC where the militant was to develop Christian principles such as loyalty to the

common good, a social consciousness, charity, fraternity, etc., and would learn to put

them into action. The author of the article observed that it was inevitable that a large

number of jucistas would eventually become politically militant. On the other hand, the

university political environment also presented some inconvenient challenges for JUC.

The article emphasized the importance of keeping a careful distinction between JUC as

an organization and individual jucistas acting political convictions based on their own

conscience. Also, the author pointed out that it was important to remember that JUC was

not intended to be a political party. The author continued by warning that although it was

impossible to avoid the increasing militancy of jucistas that nevertheless, if JUC were to

become radically politicized, it could have disastrous consequences for the future of the

Catholic student movement.34

In the eighth National Counsel in Campinas in 1958, there was a large

participation of new members of JUC and a degree of dissatisfaction of older, veteran

militants. It is the opinion of Brazilian historian, José Oscar Beozzo, that this represented

a transition from the older JUC which was composed of very devout and studious

members, to a younger more energetic JUC composed of members who were entering

university studies who had been trained in the secondary school JEC. There was an

33
JUC, “JUC e a Política Universitária,” Boletim Nacional, Bidegain Papers, Caja 5a,
Folder A, Miami: Florida International University, Department of Religion, 1957: 5.
34
JUC, 1957: 6.

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analysis of a discourse of Pius XII given at the World Congress of the Lay Apostolate.35

In the International Session of 1958 in Dakar, Brazilian leaders, including four young

women from JEC, two student leaders from both JEC and JUC and the national advisor

for JUC. A document called “Letter from Dakar” containing the common foundation of

life of the movement was issued from the Session. (Beozzo:55).

1959 - Transition
It was around this time that a team of jucistas from the Economics department in

Belo Horizonte, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, began talking

about the need for structural reform. At the annual council in Campinas in 1958, these

jucistas were severely critical of the direction of the movement, proposing discussion of

serious engagement of JUC in temporal matters. The names of the team from Belo

Horizonte included some jucistas who would figure prominently in the future of JUC and

the secular student organization (UNE).

There was a convergence of intellectual and geo-political factors in 1959 that

provided a context the ideological development and radicalization of the Brazilian JUC.

A Brazilian economist, Celso Furtado published a book on the economic history of Brazil

that further developed significant aspects of dependency theory which began some years

earlier with Argentine Raúl Prebisch and German-born Hans Singer.36 Also in 1959, the

success of Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution, with support from some priests and

35
Pope Pius XII, The Lay Apostolate, Its Need Today: An Address of Pope Pius XII to the
World Congress of the Lay Apostolate, October 14, 1951., United States Catholic
Conference (Washington, DC: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1951).
36
Celso Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil, originally published in 1959 in
Portuguese as Formação Econômica do Brasil, Cambridge Latin American Studies
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

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Catholic students of the Cuban student movement, was front page headlines in Brazil.37

The Cuban Revolution seemed to hold promise of charting a non-capitalist course of

development and agrarian reform and was not yet seen as antagonistic toward progressive

Catholicism. A further dynamic element in 1959 was the presence of the new pope, John

XXIII, and his call on January 25 for an ecumenical council to be held in Rome.

In the 1959, the national council of JUC met in Belo Horizonte. The theme of the

“Historical Ideal” (Ideal Histórico)38 was presented for the first time by Padre Almeri

Bezerra. The theoretical premises of the jucistas from the Economics department in Belo

Horizonte stood out in this meeting. They focused on the core problems of development

and nationalism and they attempted to elaborate a vision of a historical ideal for Brazil

within the lines of a socialist perspective. This group continued to be very active after the

10-year anniversary Congress of JUC in 1960 and actively participated later in the

formation of a non-confessional political party, Ação Política (AP).39

The 1959 counsel also marked the starting point of the rise of new and influential

centers of the Catholic student movement, such as the chapter in Belo Horizonte, with a

firm commitment to engaging secular society and seeking solutions for temporal

problems (Beozzo:42-43).

37
Correio Do Povo, Porto Alegre 22 Jan. 1960, Front page: (Gainesville, Latin American
Collection, University of Florida).
38
The concept of a concrete historical ideal was first coined by Jacques Maritain in
Integral Humanism, first published in French in 1936 and later developed by Emmanuel
Mounier in his Personalist Manifesto also published in French in 1938: see Joseph
Amato, Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World
(The University of Alabama Press, 1975), 144.

39
Beozzo:59.

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JUC in Brazil LAH 6915 Johnson rgh drft JWH 1/20/2020

Dear Dr. Johnson: this is as far as I got this semester. I have another 20 to 30 pages of

unorganized notes that pick up here and carry the study through the military dictatorship

of 1964 and the final dissolution of the Brazilian Catholic student organization in 1966. I

expect to find in my conclusion that the Brazilian Catholic students successfully

integrated their Catholic values into political convictions and political action, but in the

process became radicalized, threatened the status quo which resulted in their repression

by both the state and the church from 1964 and 1966.

I will also be adding a glossary at the end of all of the acronyms I am using in this paper

such as: ACB, AP, CIDI, CNBB, IUS, JEC, JECF, JECI, JUC, JUCF, JOC Pax Romana,

UNE

16