No doubt U.S. officials were gratified by the Crusade’s popularity in South America, just as Peyton clearly reveled in the opportunity to win new acolytes for the Virgin. Still, there were strains in this covert partnership of the sort that have always affected church-state relations, as well as more specific tensions typical of collaborations between the CIA and front organizations it had not created from scratch (such as, for example, the Free Trade Union Committee). Whereas Peyton measured a crusade’s success by the number of religious pledges it gathered, intelligence officers looked for evidence of political impact, scrutinizing election results to see if communist candidates were suffering at the polls and comparing the attendance at rosary rallies with that at Party meetings. This kind of assessment took time, and often led to delays in the payment of subsidies, which understandably irritated Peyton. Why, he asked Grace, were “our friends . . . so demanding on the Family Rosary Crusade” when they “do not have a one hundred percent batting average” themselves?101 Then there was the CIA’s habit of suddenly shifting country targets according to the exigencies of South American politics, often undoing months of preparation by the Crusade (again reminiscent of the OPC’s dealings with the Lovestoneites). One such “abrupt change in our plans took place at the end of the Bogotá crusade,” Peyton informed Grace, “when it was decided that all plans had to be postponed and the Crusade effort should be immediately concentrated in Recife and Rio de Janeiro.” The resulting Brazilian campaign, which lasted from 1962 to 1964, was constantly troubled by operational glitches, necessitating a series of high-level meetings between Grace, Donnelly, and “our benefactor” to “iron out some of the past communication difficulties” (not unlike the summits between the AFL and CIA in 1950 and 1951).102
For all these problems, Peyton’s impact in Brazil was arguably greater than in any other South American country. The Crusade had by 1962
perfected an evangelical technique it called the “Popular Mission,” which involved locally recruited technicians using mobile projection equipment to show the Spanish-made devotional films at open-air venues, with commentaries provided by lay catechists. To this were now added other spectacular effects designed to appeal to the massive populations of urban cen-
C AT H O L I C S
191
ters such as Rio de Janeiro, where the famous statue of the Cristo do Corcovado was adorned with a thirty-meter-long illuminated rosary and an eight-meter-high cross. When Peyton preached in the city on December 16, 1962, 1.5 million Brazilians came to listen. A year later, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8, 1963), also declared Family Day by President João Goulart, the Crusade sponsored an hour-long television broadcast from Rio that featured, among others, Bing Crosby, soccer superstar Pele, and Agostinho dos Santos, the self-styled
“bossa nova king of Brazil,” who performed a Samba version of “Ave Maria.” The program, which was also shown in other South American countries, reached the single greatest viewing audience in the Family Rosary’s history.103
These astonishing feats were accomplished against a background of growing political unrest in Brazil, which culminated in March 1964 with the overthrow of President Goulart in a military coup led by the Army’s Chief of Staff, General Humberto Castello Branco. Goulart had incurred the displeasure of Washington by pursuing such policies as appointing socialists to his cabinet, and the CIA was deeply implicated in the events that led to his unseating, through links both to local right-wing groups and U.S. organizations such as the AIFLD.104 It is, of course, impossible to say for certain what effect the Catholic traditionalism of the Family Rosary Crusade had on the popular political mood in Brazil, but various well-placed observers reckoned it was considerable. According to one ecclesiastical authority, “the Rosary . . . consolidated the ties which existed between the people’s aspirations and the patriotic vigilance of the Armed Forces.”105 “I admire the Crusade,” General Branco himself announced, shortly after the coup. “Since the Great Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, I give it credit . . . for the formation of the public opinion of the Brazilian people in order to have the valor to bring about the revolution of March 31.”106
Patrick Peyton was, therefore, only telling the truth when he reported to his Holy Cross superiors, “much credit is given by great leaders in the Church and State in Brazil to the Family Rosary Crusade in the overthrow of the Goulart Government.”107
As it turned out, Peyton’s pleasure at events in Brazil was not shared by his Holy Cross colleagues. The Catholic church of 1964 was a very different institution from the one that had approved the rosary priest’s entry into South America in 1958. The death that year of the unbending
192