How a Lenten Campaign Shaped Public Life in Brazil

I. Why Brazil’s annual Catholic Lenten campaign matters

This paper began with a deceptively simple hypothesis: Brazil’s Fraternity Campaign, known as Campanha da Fraternidade, is not only a Lenten fundraiser but a liturgical public sphere. Every Lent, Catholics across the country receive study guides, listen to homilies, sing hymns, see posters in parish halls, and gather in small circles to reflect and plan. If we treat those materials as a longitudinal archive rather than seasonal ephemera, a pattern becomes visible. The familiar pedagogy of see, judge, and act retains its liturgical form across political time, yet the balance within that triad shifts. Under authoritarian rule, the predominant tone was social charity. With Brazil’s return to democracy, the language of citizenship and rights came to the fore. Over the past decade, integral ecology has taken center stage within a Catholic vocabulary that already knows water, bread, oil, and the rhythm of a sacramental calendar.

The paper asks whether this evolution can be tracked and defended empirically across six decades and whether “liturgical public sphere” aptly names the place where catechesis and public argument meet. I argue that both propositions hold. The campaign has repeatedly translated Lenten rhythms into civic engagement while preserving the ritual core that gives the whole enterprise coherence.

The ecological turn makes this convergence especially clear. The 2025 jubilee theme, Fraternity and Integral Ecology, and the motto “God saw that it was very good” align liturgical time, ecological concern, and the synodal call to walk together. Preparatory notes encourage dioceses to plan for carbon neutrality and invite parishes to support concrete measures for rainforest protection. In this sense, sacramental language now travels directly into policy advocacy. This is not a rupture. It is an intensification of the campaign’s longstanding habit of linking devotion to the common good.

II. Method and evidence with insights from the 2022 Brazil census

Methodologically, I created a digital corpus of foundational texts, posters, and hymns from 1961 to 2025 and coded them thematically. Three features guided the coding scheme. First, I tracked internal shifts within the triad of see, judge, and act. Second, I recorded explicit references to public policy, including sanitation, food security, and indigenous territorial rights. Third, I examined how ecological vocabulary is refracted through sacramental motifs that parish communities already understand. Water is the most obvious example. It functions as a sacramental sign at the font and as a policy concern when sewage and drinking water supply fail. That refractive quality proved crucial. The campaign’s ecological language does not import environmentalism as an external ideology. It integrates environmental concerns within a devotional grammar that is already familiar, which makes the message intelligible and actionable at parish scale. The ecological arc also coheres with papal teaching. Benedict XVI’s language of “human ecology” set a path later consolidated in Laudato Si’ and sharpened in Laudate Deum.

The corpus shows a steady pairing of catechesis with concrete public demands. In 2016, the ecumenical campaign Common Home, Our Responsibility tied baptismal imagery to Brazil’s sanitation crisis during the Zika emergency and invited communities to read Lenten water symbolism alongside municipal service gaps. In 2020, the icon of the Good Samaritan opened a narrative space to name ecological sin and foreground the rights of indigenous peoples. In 2023, the theme of hunger was tethered to constitutional guarantees and to the federal budget architecture that protects a zero hunger agenda. The pandemic years intensified a second pattern. Digital distribution of texts and moderated parish study circles helped sustain participation while reducing paper and travel. In this account, the technology matters less for its novelty than for how it extends the reach of an already stable liturgical cadence.

The 2022 Demographic Census adds a hard constraint and a strategic opportunity. Catholic affiliation fell below 60% nationally. Pluralization is no longer a projection. It is a measured fact. The paper treats that figure not as a lament but as the structural condition within which the campaign’s public role must be understood. The campaign is a deprivatized religious actor that remains audible in policy debates even as its demographic majority wanes. Disaggregation sharpens the picture. In the Legal Amazon, Catholic identification trails Protestant adherence by several percentage points. That reversal of the national pattern signals frontier religious competition that is reshaping local publics. The long arc of evangelical growth, from about 5% in 1970 to roughly 27% by the mid 2020s, intensifies that competition and helps explain why a campaign fluent in the languages of rights and environmental stewardship has become consequential in Amazonian debates.

This is also why the 2025 theme matters. A campaign that asks parishes to plan for carbon neutrality and to advocate for rainforest protection is not simply adding ecology to Lent. It is using ritual cadence to scaffold civic learning in a religious marketplace where attention is contested and where policy outcomes remain open. Sanitation budgets can grow or shrink. Land demarcations can move forward or stall. School nutrition programs can be safeguarded or abandoned. The census figures make the stakes legible. There may be fewer Catholics on paper, yet the campaign can sustain or even increase its public effectiveness if it continues to convert liturgy into actionable agendas at scale.

III. Implications for COP 30 in Belém

The payoff of the research is a claim about form and function. The form is a remarkably stable yearly cycle that runs from Ash Wednesday launches through parish study circles to Holy Week collections and audits. That stability allows comparison across decades without flattening devotional life. The function is the capacity to connect that cycle to evolving public priorities. This is what explains the three broad inflections that the paper traces across the archive. Charity dominates under dictatorship and allows cautious speech to find emphatic gestures of solidarity. Citizenship becomes the keynote after 1985 and anchors pastoral action in constitutional language and in a grammar of social rights. Ecology rises in the 2010s and organizes the Lenten calendar around care for our common home. In this light, the ecological phase is not a thematic substitution. It is a translation device. Water, bread, and oil bridge sacrament and climate. The synodal idea of walking together becomes a practical grammar for planetary care. The campaign thereby operationalizes integral ecology from the parish outward.

The census numbers sharpen the strategic horizon in two ways. First, they force the Church to trade scale by default for credibility through practice. The comparative advantage is no longer automatic majority. It is demonstrated competence at turning teachings into measurable demands and verifiable results. Second, the census invites attention to the infrastructure of participation that the Church has quietly built. Catechetical networks are obvious, but newer digital connective tissues also matter. In a polarized media environment, that ability to coordinate and to learn across places is not a side story. It is part of why digitalization increased, rather than eroded, communal agency.

All of this unfolds as Brazil prepares to host COP 30 in Belém. The paper’s conclusion is intentionally pragmatic. The Fraternity Campaign positions the Brazilian Church as a credible moral interlocutor ahead of COP 30 precisely because it has spent a decade rehearsing an ecology that is never only abstract and never only pietistic. It is catechetical and political at once. Parish routines map onto municipal plans, budget lines, and legal protections. In that sense, the liturgical public sphere is not a figure of speech. It is an institutional mechanism through which a religious calendar can reenter national life with thematic focus and with civic consequences. As the country moves toward COP 30, that mechanism could serve as a bridge between parish activism and federal climate commitments, especially across the Amazonian frontier where the religious landscape is most fluid and the environmental stakes are highest.