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FREI BETTO

Frei Betto is a Brazilian priest, born in Belo Horizonte in 1944. He became active at a very young age in the Catholic Student Youth and was imprisoned by the military dictatorship in 1964, when he was a journalism student. The following year he entered the Dominican order. Along with his studies of philosophy and theology, he worked as a journalist and in the movement opposing Brazil’s military regime.

Frei Betto worked with the internationally renowned Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire, who enabled peasants to quickly learn to read by providing materials about politics, power, and liberation.

Imprisoned again in 1969, on his release in 1974 he became involved with organizing Christian base communities in poor and industrial neighborhoods. During the 1980s he worked in Nicaragua, Cuba, China, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, advising on issues of religion and the state. He has also been prominent in the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and at the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre. More recently he has been an adviser to the Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva government in Brazil on social policy and the Zero Hunger project.

Frei Betto is a member of the International Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians and is widely acclaimed as author of over a dozen books on liberation theology.