Dom helder camara and louis-joseph lebret: Developmentalism and progressive catholic praxis in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The article deals with the thought and political action of Archbishop Helder Camara and Priest Louis-Joseph Lebret in the 1950s and 1960s. The goal is to reflect on the formation of a progressive lineage of Catholic thought in Brazil, particu-larly highlighting its developmental aspect. Thus, the trajectories of these clerics are followed, concerning the following aspects: biographical issues, intellectual, technical, philosophical and ecclesiastical formation, as well as their relationship networks, how their ideas were received, their participation in internal debates in the Church and also their collaborative relations with national-developmental governments, revealing their contributions to the transformative praxis that pre-ceded the gestation of a revolutionary bias of the Catholic left in Latin America, which marked the formation of Liberation Theology. The study of these clerics´ thinking gains contemporary prominence if we take into account the recent reha-bilitation and revaluation of icons of the Latin American Catholic left and the resumption of the Church’s Social Doctrine, based on Pope Francis’ progressive platform, which maintains close ties with the developmental matrix of Catholic thought and certain principles of Liberation Theology.