Page 179 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

164 Maria José A. de Abreu

and do spiritual rehabilitation work among alcoholics and drug addicts,
Father Dougherty resolutely mobilized his physical and material capital
to start up a Catholic global media network. Very few have ever seen
Father Rahm or even know about his activities. Father Dougherty, on
the contrary, is renowned as the pioneer of the CCR in Brazil but espe-
cially for introducing Catholic televangelism to the country.
The protechnology policies of the ruling regime at the time of the
CCR’s arrival in Brazil seemed to offer particularly favorable grounds to
launch a global media Catholic crusade. It provided the conservative allies
of Catholicism with the opportunity to not only counter the surge of
American based Protestant televangelism that was spreading all over Latin
America but also to break through a deep-seated prejudice against televan-
gelism lodged within the progressive Church of Brazil. One of the reasons
why Liberation Theology’s militant Catholicism vehemently resisted the
importation of Catholic televangelism to Brazil was that it unsettled
the assumption that televangelism was a strictly Protestant phenomenon.
The fact that the CCR evolved as a predominantly upper middle-class
movement among university scholars, affiliated with conservative Catholic
groups such as Opus Dei or the Cursilhos, only deepened the rift separat-
ing a local progressive left-wing Catholic Church whose alleged “prefer-
ence for the poor” proved irreconcilable with what they considered CCR’s
spiritually oriented, Americanized tele-evangelical industry.
Still determined to carry on with his mission, Father Dougherty intro-
duced a strategy based on marketing, technology, and money from
America. Later, in the early 1980s, he was chosen to be the entrepreneur
responsible for applying the ideals developed by two global media projects
to Brazil: the Lumen Project financed by Holland and Evangelization 2000
by the United States, two projects that proved to be groundbreaking. He
received a donation of US$ 100,000 and new electronic equipment, with
which he further extended his association and TV production center called
TV Century XXI (Carranza 2000, 246–265). Subsequently, he hired a
team of professionals in the field of communication, independent of their
religious affiliations, and a well-known Catholic marketing expert. In
reaction, legendary Liberation Theology activist Don Paul Evaristo who

presided over the archdioceses of São Paulo, strongly condemned Father
Dougherty’s attempt to “market Christianity.” Furthermore, São Paulo’s
main broadsheet, Estado de São Paulo, denounced the CCR as part of a
political maneuver by the Vatican and the conservative elites to eradicate
communism and Liberation Theology from the face of the earth (Carranza
2000, 246). Father Dougherty was labeled a “demon from the north” as
liberationists often characterized Protestant Pentecostalism (Lima 1987),
except that now the demon wore a clerical habit.