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Signs of Awakening. At the heart of many of Brazil's problems is its long neglect of education, which is responsible for its high illiteracy. Not until 1922 did Brazil even create a university—and then only because Belgium's King Albert was making a state visit and had asked to address some university students. Today, there are only 170,000 students in Brazilian universities, slightly fewer than in Argentina, which has only one-fourth of Brazil's population. Half of them are majoring in philosophy and law, few in the skills that Brazil really needs. Among his first orders of business after taking office, Costa instructed all universities to ignore the results of admission exams and admit any students who wanted into their medical, engineering and other professional schools. He also promised to double the current capacity of Brazil's 41 universities.
A good part of the blame for the parlous state of Brazil's education belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, which has always opposed the public-school system, runs 80% of secondary schools and, in most cases, has shown considerable apathy toward education for the really poor. Though the church has lately exhibited signs of awakening to the necessity of social revolution, it is still a bastion of traditionalism in Brazil, where 95% of the population is at least nominally, and rather relaxedly, Catholic. Of Brazil's four cardinals, only Sao Paulo's Agnelo Rossi is an active promoter of social reform. The country's 226 bishops range from hard-core reactionaries to the liberal likes of Dom Helder Cámara, who calls himself a "padre" and suggests that bishops doff their gold crosses and purple stockings and get nearer to the people.
The church, in effect, allies itself with Brazil's aristocracy, which controls an incredible amount of the country's wealth; indeed, the church is heavily entrenched in real estate ownership, holding a large but secret percentage of Brazilian land. Because Brazil's church is not nearer to the people, it is in a steadily weakening position. The country has fewer than 11,000 priests, or only one per 8,000 people, and 40% of them are foreigners. The number of Protestants is growing, having increased from only 40,000 in 1900 to more than 3,000,000 today, according to the Brazilian Protestant Council. The Protestants have almost 9,000 ministers, who may before long outnumber the priests. An even faster growing form of worship is spiritualism, which has more than 10 million followers who practice everything from African fetishism and nature rites to macumba, the Brazilian version of voodoo.
Stone-Age Conditions. The country itself shows just as much diversity. It is a nation of great racial variety—and harmony—in which 65% of the people are white (though often of mixed blood) and the rest range over a varying spectrum from cocoa brown to black. In the remoter reaches of the Amazon, which makes up about half of Brazil and stretches like an endless sea to the west, there are more than 150 different Indian tribes who speak scores of dialects and live in Stone-Age conditions. On top of its racial mix, Brazil has absorbed many immigrant nationalities, ranging from the more predominant Portuguese and Italian to Japanese, German, Bulgarian, Lebanese and even Icelandic. Sao Paulo alone boasts 90 different nationalities.