Operation Periphery: Liberation Theology and Remaking the Catholic Church in São Paulo

In 1972, the archbishop Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns launched Operation Periphery (Operação Periferia), a sweeping emergency campaign to address poverty in the expanding urban peripheries of São Paulo, already the most populous Catholic archdiocese in the world. Even as it expanded social services, Operation Periphery created new parishes and organized laypeople in the periphery into base communities or comunidades eclesiais de base. As this talk explores, Operation Periphery placed São Paulo at the center of global efforts to reimagine the Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican II (1962-65) and the Council of Medellín (1968). Using oral histories with key protagonists and hitherto unavailable records, it traces how activist clergy and laypeople, mainly working-class migrant women, created a horizontal “people’s church” closely aligned with liberation theology during Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964-85).
 
Daniel McDonald is a historian of modern Latin America and Brazil whose research focuses on Catholicism, citizenship, and social movements. At present, he is a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of History and a member of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford.

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