Page 180 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Breath, Technology, Making of Community 165

As a Catholic Pentecostal movement the CCR was particularly unwel-
come because of its hybrid status. It not only distressed progressive
Catholics who tended to equate Pentecostalism with North American con-
servatism in opposition to southern liberalism, but also alerted Protestant
Pentecostals who began to accuse Catholics of copying their “methods.”
Flanked between an antiregime liberationist Catholic majority with a
renowned scorn of televangelism and a call to evangelize through the
media, Brazilian Padre Jonas realized that he would have to strategize to
his own advantage by navigating between the extremes. But instead of dis-
sipating hybridity by taking one of the sides, he thought it better to inter-
nalize hybridity and vault over the arched backs of the two main local
quarrelsome political forces into a middle zone, eventually, turning this
bridge into the strength of his program.

Unlocking the Paths

In 1969, the same year that the CCR arrived in Brazil from the United
States, Silesian Padre Jonas Abib (of Lebanese origin and recently ordained)
entered a sanatorium in Campos do Jordão—SP due to a serious lung dis-
ease. The news about his illness kept him from further participating in the
activities of his parish within the region of the Paraiba Valley. Acknowledged
as an ambitious and restless person, he rebelled against his chronic pneu-
monia, just as he did against his superiors who, unable to make sense of his
agitations, kept reshuffling him around various parishes within the Valley.
In the sanatorium, Padre Jonas started to compose songs, and there he
assembled a choir of fellow pneumonic patients bizarrely shaking the walls
of the sanatorium. The personnel read into event the expression of an ulte-
rior force that was asking for the release of Padre Jonas. As he describes in
one of his books,

In the next month we had a youth meeting at the sanatorium. Then, not
without reason, the doctor called my superior, and told him that if he would
want me to be cured he had to let me out. That is what my superior did: he
sent me off to Lorena. (Abib 1999, 14)
While in Lorena, one of the Valley’s districts, Padre Jonas meets Father
Haroldo Rahm, the other CCR pioneer during a “Seminar in the Spirit.”
During that event in 1971, Padre Jonas was baptized in the Spirit. Many
report that the origins of Canção Nova must be found in the baptismal
moment of Padre Jonas. That then, and only then, did the pneumonia of