In the face of the curious silence of the media, the Brazilian journalist Alberto Dines hosted this TV debate on 25 November 2008 about the concordat which had been secretly signed the month before. “There were hugs, there were blessings, there were pictures, but no statement on what was dealt with between the President and the Pontiff. In the days that followed the news was trivial, contradictory and clearly deceptive.” *
Nothing new? A bishop tries to dispel concern about letting Catholic catechism into state schools by arguing that "The treaty only groups, in a single text, what is already in the Constitution, in jurisprudence and the ordinary law". However, the Brazilian education law belies this: it was clearly intended to foster tolerance of the country's religious diversity — not classes in Catholic catechism.
The Association of Brazilian Magistrates (Associação dos Magistrados Brasileiros), protests that the concordat not only violates the constitutional separation of church and state, but also goes against Brazilian values which cherish the diversity of all its citizens.
Many of the innocent-sounding phrases in the latest Brazilian concordat have, when implemented, caused problems in other countries, including Italy, Germany, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, the Dominican Republic and Malta.
It requires intrigue to get a concordat accepted by a secular state like Brazil: a secret signing at the Vatican, an implicit agreement with the Evangelical press to keep quiet, and the bishops' lobbying to avoid a congressional debate. An appendix contains four hard-to-find official and semi-official Church accounts of the signing of this concordat.
This concordat embeds Catholic chaplains (and Canon Law) in the military, gives them a central location at the military headquarters and obliges the state to support them. The military concordat is mentioned enigmatically in the new one. This appears to be a move to get the unsuspecting Congressmen to ratify retroactively, a concordat which is legally void, but long since put into practice.
