ABSTRACT
Most visibly, priests and Bishops in Brazil, to a greater extent than anywhere else, took an active role in the formation and development of CEBs ('Comunidades Eclesiais de Base - Christian Base Organizations) which, during the 1970s and early 1980s, often provided the core organizational thrust of local social movements of the most diverse types, mostly in the cities but also in parts of the rural areas. These organizations were born out of the Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin in 1968 in an initiative designed more to remedy the shortage of priests than to raise the consciousness of the people. But soon the followers of liberation theology took up the idea as a method of rebuilding the Church from below, empowering the laity and placing the People of God at the helm, inspired by an innate, untutored and untainted faith. The CEBs tended to attract the slightly better off and better educated people living in low-income neighbourhoods, and tended also to rely quite heavily on clerical support for their survival, their development and for the funding of their projects. But they did also provide leadership to networks of local social movements, concerned with land, transport, health, and also more political issues such as human rights and democratization. Because the CEBs relied so much on support from the hierarchy, their orientation also came under the influence of the local bishop, so that in Sao Paulo, under Archbishop Paulo Evaristo Ants, they took a more radical line, whereas in Santiago de Chile they seem to have concentrated more on traditional issues of piety and morality.
