Arns, Dom Paulo Evaristo

(1921– )

   Catholic cardinal, archbishop, human-rights advocate, and outspoken critic of Brazil’s 1964–1985 military dictatorship. Born in Forquilhinha in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, Arns was ordained a Franciscan priest in 1945. He earned a doctorate in 1952 from the Sorbonne, in Paris, and then returned to Brazil, where he worked as a theology professor and as a journalist. He became a bishop in 1966. Pope Paul VI named him the archbishop of São Paulo in 1970 and then a cardinal in 1973. Within the Latin American Catholic Church, he was identified with the progressive wing, which allied itself with the region’s poor. As archbishop, he sold the Palácio Episcopal, his official residence, and used the money to build community centers. Soon after he became archbishop, the secret police arrested and tortured one of his priests. Arns denounced the arrest at the governor’s office as well as at the prison itself. After being turned away from the latter, he reported the arrest in the archdiocesan newspaper and radio station and posted a description of the arrest on every church door in São Paulo. He continued to speak out against torture, calling on his fellow bishops to join him. After Vladimir Herzog, a Jewish immigrant and prominent journalist, was tortured to death by a São Paulo death squad in October 1975, Arns defied the military by officiating—with Henry Sobel, a rabbi, and Jaime Wright, a Presbyterian minister—at an ecumenical service for him at the São Paulo cathedral, which was surrounded by police. Then in 1979 Arns and Wright teamed up to begin Brasil: Nunca Mais (BNM, Brazil: Never Again), a top-secret project of photocopying military documents that verified the use of torture to extract confessions. The documents became the basis of the book Brasil: Nunca mais (1985), which was published in English under the title Torture in Brazil (1986). Since his retirement in 1998, Arns has been active in UNESCO.