Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, whose advocacy of human rights in Brazil placed him in opposition to a military dictatorship that engaged in systemic torture, died on Wednesday in São Paulo. He was 95.
The São Paulo Archdiocese confirmed his death, from pneumonia.
“Where human rights are not respected, we speak out against them,” Cardinal Arns said in 1972, a year before he was made a cardinal by Pope Paul VI. “When these rights are defended, we find ourselves in support.”
Dom Paulo, as he was known, became an enemy of the government for his stance against the torture of political prisoners. After the murder in 1975 of a journalist, Vladimir Herzog, that the government called a suicide, Cardinal Arns led an ecumenical service, along with rabbis and a Presbyterian minister, that was attended by 8,000 people.
Afterward, a group of bishops issued a pastoral letter that deplored torture, the denial of prisoners’ rights to a full legal defense and the suspension of habeas corpus.
Continue reading the main storyIn support, Cardinal Arns said: “Those who stain their hands with blood are damned. Thou shalt not kill.”
In 1979, when Cardinal Arns went to a morgue to retrieve the body of Santo Dias da Silva, a labor leader killed by the military police, officers backed away as he waved his hand.
A lawyer, Luiz Eduardo Greenhalgh, accompanied him to the scene. “We went in, and Cardinal Arns looked at the bullet holes on Santo’s body,” he was quoted saying this year by the Catholic News Service. “He pointed his finger at the policemen and said, ‘Look what you did!’ And all the officers lowered their heads in shame.”
In his sermon at Mr. Dias’s funeral, Cardinal Arns said, “Every age, and sometimes every event, must have its Christ, because only thus will the fellow workers remain united and will not lose hope.”
Cardinal Arns helped develop “Brasil: Nunca Mais,” or “Brazil: Never More,” a voluminous investigative document that chronicled the military government’s torture of political opponents. Compiled largely in secret, it used military trial transcripts to build its case. It was published after the inauguration of a civilian government in 1985.
The report eventually led to a Brazilian truth commission report in 2014 that identified 377 individuals responsible for human rights violations and called for their prosecution.
“In the time when Brazil was living a cruel dictatorship, he always spoke and spoke loudly against torture, against violations of human rights and the lack of freedoms that were taken by the dictatorship,” Maria Clara Bingemer, a theologian and Brazilian Fulbright distinguished chair in democracy and human development at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, said in an interview last week. “He always intervened when he knew there were tortures.”
Paulo Evaristo Arns was born on Sept. 14, 1921, in Forquilhinha, Brazil. His parents, Gabriel and Helena, were German immigrants who had 12 other children; three daughters became nuns, and another son was ordained a priest. One of Cardinal Arns’s sisters, Zilda Arns Neumann, was a pediatrician and humanitarian-aid worker who died in the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Cardinal Arns was educated by Franciscans in Brazil and ordained in 1945. He moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where he earned a doctorate.
After teaching at several schools, including the Catholic University of Petrópolis, Brazil, he was appointed auxiliary bishop of São Paulo by Pope Paul VI in 1966 and made archbishop four years later. He sold the diocese’s residence to finance charitable works.
Cardinal Arns believed in liberation theology, a left-leaning movement in the Roman Catholic Church focused on empowering the poor through political and civic involvement. The Vatican under Pope John Paul II opposed it, saying it was influenced by Marxism.
“The Vatican was O.K. with Dom Paulo’s activism against torturers, but it had difficulty with his support of liberation theology,” Professor Bingemer said. “But he never stopped doing it.”
Cardinal Arns defended his views at the Vatican in 1984 in a direct encounter with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI and the chief defender of church doctrine at the time.
He and another Brazilian cardinal were accompanying the Brazilian theologian and friar Leonardo Boff, who had been summoned to Rome to defend his own advocacy of liberation theology. While there, Mr. Boff said in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper in 1996, Cardinal Arns warned Cardinal Ratzinger that he would denounce persecution of liberation theology in Germany, the cardinal’s home country.
Cardinal Arns angered conservatives in 1989 when he sent a letter to President Fidel Castro, on the 30th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, expressing his hope that Mr. Castro would continue to govern the country for a long time. He wrote that Cuba was an example of social justice to Latin America.
“Christian faith,” he wrote, “discovers in the achievements of the revolution signs of the kingdom of God.”
The Brazilian newspaper O Globo denounced Cardinal Arns’s support of Mr. Castro, saying in an editorial that it was “simply unbelievable that an archbishop should discover similarities between the kingdom of God and a totalitarian police state.”
Cardinal Arns told reporters that he and Mr. Castro often exchanged letters, but that he was opposed to “any dictatorship.”
He survived Mr. Castro by less than a month.
Cardinal Arns retired in 1998.
At his recent 95th-birthday celebration in São Paulo, he sat on the stage of a college theater and was remembered for his devotion to the poor, the wrongly incarcerated and the tortured.
“When Brazil was plunged into darkness,” Fernando Altemeyer, his former press secretary, said, “Dom Paulo was the star that illuminated it.”
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