Eugênio de Araújo Sales
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Eugênio de Araújo Sales |
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Eugênio de Araújo Sales (born November 8, 1920, Acarì, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil) is currently the second-longest-serving cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, having been elevated by Pope Paul VI on April 28, 1969. He served as archbishop of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro for thirty years until he passed the maximum age for voting in a papal conclave in 2001.
Sales was born to a prominent upper-class family: his father, Celso Dantas Sales, was a judge in the High Court (see Supreme Federal Tribunal). He did humanistic studies as a teenager and entered the minor seminary at Natal in 1936, graduating in 1941 to the major seminary at Fortaleza. He was ordained on November 21, 1943 and spend the following decade in pastoral work.
Sales became auxiliary bishop of Natal on June 1, 1954 and he attended all the sessions of the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. He became Archbishop of São Salvador da Bahia in 1968 and was elevated to Cardinal soon after. During this period Sales began to work closely with the military junta that had been ruling Brazil since 1964. He became the major figure behind the Bipartite Commission, in which church leaders met in secret with the leaders of Emilio Garrastazu Medici's regime to legitimise Catholicism in contexts not approved of by most within the Church - considered the most repressive period of Brazil's military dictatorship. As Archbishop of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro from 1971, Sales, despite being theologically extremely conservative, did protest the many human rights violations in Brazil during the period.
Sales participated in the August and October 1978 conclaves and his work supporting those tortured by the regime in this era has been only recently noted by historians of Brazil. Following the fall of the military dictatorship and Pope John Paul II's reining in of theological dissent, Sales became the Church's most prominent voice against what he saw as dissent from Catholic moral teaching. In the 1990s he made many efforts to become a cultural leader in this struggle: going so far as to oppose the traditional Carnival in Rio de Janeiro with a "festival of prayer" which he saw as opposing trends towards sexual libertinism in modern Brazil.
At the death of Pope John Paul II, Sales was the second-longest-serving cardinal in the Church and as such, although at 84 unable to vote in the 2005 conclave, he played an important role in the pre-conclave discussions. He presided one of the funeral Masses for John Paul II during the Novemdiales (nine days of mourning for the deceased Pope) as protoprete.
| Preceded by Jaime de Barros Câmara |
Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro 13 March 1971–25 July 2001 |
Succeeded by Eusébio Scheid |
