SÃO PAULO – An appearance by Cardinal Orani Tempesta of Rio de Janeiro at a ceremony with President Jair Bolsonaro last week, as the country prepares to enter the campaign for the 2022 presidential election, has caused controversy in Brazil.

Tempesta, Bolsonaro, and other authorities met at the Christ the Redeemer Sanctuary to sign a cooperation agreement in which the federal government increased the church’s autonomy in managing the site.

The monument belongs to the Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro but is located in a federal forest reserve. Over the past few years, there have been numerous clashes with the park’s security officers, who had frequently created obstacles to the sanctuary’s workers and priests when they tried to enter the park and reach the chapel located at the foot of the monument.

Although the full details of the agreement are still being worked out, Father Omar Raposo, the sanctuary’s rector, has already declared that the chapel will now be open all day long, according to the news website G1.

After the meeting, Bolsonaro told the press that the protocol with the archdiocese had “great symbolism for all of us, Catholics from all over Brazil.”

“[Ours is] An administration that believes in God and defends family. Faith has elected us and saved us in the past. Without faith, how could we resist so much adversity, with most of the press against us?” Bolsonaro told the journalists.

The pictures of Tempesta side by side with Bolsonaro caused controversy among Brazilian Catholics, especially Bolsonaro’s opponents. Many saw the ceremony as part of Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign as he seeks reelection in October.

Two days after the meeting, the progressive groups Padres da Caminhada (The Walking Priests) and Priests against Fascism, which include hundreds of priests and even some bishops, released a joint statement criticizing the ceremony. In the public letter, the groups asked, “How can Bolsonaro still say he is a Catholic?”

“Or rather, how can he still want to be recognized as a Christian? The President of the Republic despises God’s greatest gift, life, something that he has demonstrated several times during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the letter says, alluding to Bolsonaro’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis.

The letter added that he “disrespects the environment and the original inhabitants of our land, he is racist, misogynist, and homophobic and does not hide his aversion to the poor, those who were central to Jesus, the Redeemer.”

Tempesta was also criticized in the statement. The authors expressed their “indignation” with “the presence of Catholic authorities, especially Cardinal Orani Tempesta.”

“In the year of his election, during the celebration of Chrism Mass, the pope exhorted the bishops and presbyters: ‘Be shepherds with the smell of sheep.’ It is not possible to conceive a bishop with ‘smell of sheep’ side by side with a wolf,” the document said.

The document added that Bolsonaro would visit another Catholic sanctuary on April 9, in Paraná State.

“In an election year, to see mercenaries simply opening their temples so the wolf can snatch the sheep is a scandal,” it said.

According to Father Leomar Montagna, a priest in the Archdiocese of Maringá and a member of the groups that signed the letter, “a person who is as incoherent with the faith as he is cannot be welcomed like that.”

“The ones who lead and have the responsibility of a pastor should be more careful with the political use of such meetings, because people [churchgoers] can be deceived [when they see a candidate in the church with a member of the clergy],” the priest told Crux.

In Montagna’s opinion, Bolsonaro has continually “denied the principles of human dignity, truth, and justice in his public behavior, something that cannot be reconciled with faith.”

“He claims to be Catholic, but he does not express any coherence with that. He is a person who incentivizes the use of guns, who expresses hate, who denied the COVID-19 vaccines’ efficacy, who does not have any policy for the environment. We cannot remain silent,” he said.

Montagna said their main concern is that such events might become common during the electoral campaign.

Bolsonaro claims to be Catholic, but he is married – for the third time – to an Evangelical woman and is frequently seen at Pentecostal services alongside her. He has established a strong alliance with Evangelicals, who make up an important part of his constituency. In 2016, he was baptized by an Evangelical pastor and political leader in the Jordan river.

According to Francisco Borba Ribeiro Neto, the director of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo’s Center of Faith and Culture, “Catholic bishops must welcome and dialogue with everybody who goes to them, something that comes as an obligation of the non-partisan stance that must guide the Catholic Church, as its social doctrine stipulates.”

“In this sense, it would be scandalous if Cardinal Orani Tempesta refused to welcome Bolsonaro or [former president and current candidate] Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,” he told Crux.

Borba said that there was a concrete problem in the Christ the Redeemer sanctuary, and that Bolsonaro “took advantage of that fact to be seen by the cardinal’s side, which was inevitable, given that the matter was solved in his tenure.”

He explained that Lula’s supporters have established an “intense dialogue with the church over the past few years, trying to show their affinities with the church’s social thought and to reaffirm his alleged innocence in the corruption charges” against him.

“Bolsonarists cultivated only the Evangelical support. The moderate clergy tends to distance from him, due to the scandals of his administration. Now, Bolsonaro needs an offensive to rebuild his base among moderate Catholics,” he said.

The Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro was contacted for this article, but did not give a comment.