Brazil: Urbanization poses pastoral challenges

Aid to the Church in Need is helping the local Church serve new and growing communities of faithful, who are moving out of rural communities and into struggling cities.

Millions of people are leaving the rural parts of the Amazon region for its cities, hoping to find a better life.

According to recent figures, six of the 20 cities with the highest growth in favelas, or shanty towns, over the last four decades are in the Amazon region.

Those who leave their ancestral lands hope for better economic conditions in the big cities, but these dreams often give way to a life of poverty in rundown shacks in high-risk areas, with little or no health care. The move from tightknit communities to the relative anonymity of massive towns can also sever ties to local customs and traditions, including the faith.

Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) is helping local dioceses to keep the faith alive through a series of projects, providing financial aid to missionary groups that work in and around big cities. The organization also helps with the formation of 66 seminarians, who represent the future of the Church in the region.

A lose-lose situation

Many families in poorer parts of Brazil are forced to move to the big cities. Jenisângela Rosa, who is from Shalom, one of the missionary movements supported by ACN, tells the charity about one especially difficult recent case.

“We worked with a family, a couple with five children and expecting their sixth, who worked on a ranch over two hours from the nearest maternity center, with no transportation system and no schools. And before her appointment at the maternity center, the mother went into labor. She and the baby almost died. After this terrible experience, they decided to move back to the city. We helped them by finding the husband a job and the family a safe place to live, but it is not big enough for them, so we are trying to do more,” she said.

“Church organizations and the authorities must find ways to provide families with access to basic services in their homelands. Often it is situations like these that force them to emigrate to the cities, as they must choose between access to education, health care and food, and remaining connected to their traditions and way of life. Either way, they are deprived of their fundamental rights,” said the Shalom missionary.

Seeds that bear fruit

Manaus, the capital of the Amazon region, has a population of two million. Sister Irma, who heads another missionary group supported by ACN, Comunidade Sementes do Verbo (The Seeds of the Word Community), explained that their work in Manaus involves “cooperating with the local Church through support and training, and increasing the number of pastoral agents for evangelization. This allows the Church to provide a more efficient response to the urban population, which is often lacking in moral and spiritual values.”

Adults who move to the cities must work long hours to make a living, and not much time is left to care for children, who can fall prey to the common traps of drug use, sexual promiscuity, and criminality. “We have missionary teams that carry out social and evangelization work with children, adolescents, young people, and adults. This has contributed to their human and spiritual formation, as well as promoting integration and values. Our mission is to give them information about drug use, or to help them overcome addiction. Our missionaries spread the faith, but also work on forming a Christian outlook that helps them to mature and deal with personal trauma, and to begin again through a personal experience with God and the Church.”

However, their work also takes place downstream, literally, with approximately 35,000 riverside rural communities that live in the interior of the Amazon jungle. The aim of this work is “to reduce the migratory exodus which leads so many to leave their homelands. Of these people, around one million have no one close to them who could introduce them to the Gospel. For us, this is an important challenge to respond to,” she said.

Sister Miriam explains that 20 young men are currently training to be priests in the Dom Vicente Zico Seminary of the Archdiocese of Belém do Pará, which is backed by ACN, to place themselves at the service of the Church and the local community to which they are sent. “We had one ordination in 2023, and in 2024, by the grace of God, we will have five more.”

Regina Lynch, executive president of ACN, confirms the importance of ACN’s support for pastoral care inBrazil: “I visited some very poor areas, which even the police don’t dare to enter, and I was so impressed by the new ecclesial movements, including consecrated laity and priests, who live in these slums with the people and are widely respected by the population.”

—Filipe d’Avillez