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Retired United Methodist pastor compensated for torture

>Oct. 10, 2008

NOTE: Photographs are available at http://umns.umc.org.

>A UMNS Report By Linda Bloom*

Thirty-four years after being tortured by the military dictatorship in
Brazil, a retired United Methodist pastor is receiving both monetary
compensation and a formal request for forgiveness.

The Rev. Frederick Birten Morris, 74, who now resides in Panama, will be
paid 285,000 Brazilian reais-more than $122,000 in U.S. dollars-along
with a monthly pension of 2,000 reais, about $900.

The award comes from the Brazil Justice Ministry's Amnesty Commission,
which also invited Morris and 12 other survivors to participate in a
Sept. 26 event in the capital city of Brasilia.

More important than the money to Morris was the fact that the Brazilian
government formally asked for forgiveness.

"I don't know of any government that's ever done that," Morris told
United Methodist News Service in an Oct. 7 telephone interview.

A representative of the College of Bishops of the Methodist Church in
Brazil attended the event and "also asked for my forgiveness," which "I
found overwhelming," Morris said. "It was a very emotional day."

"The General Board of Global Ministries is thankful that a degree of
justice has been achieved in the case of Fred Morris' inhumane and
unlawful incarceration in Brazil," said the Rev. Jorge Domingues, a
board executive who has been monitoring his case. "We honor the courage
he displayed at the time of his ordeal, and we are grateful for his
service as a missionary and his ministry in subsequent years."

An Associated Press story about his compensation noted that the Amnesty
Commission is reviewing cases of victims of the 1964-85 dictatorship.
However, unlike other South American nations such as Argentina and
Chile, Brazil has never prosecuted any member of the armed forces for
human rights abuses.

A 1979 amnesty law resulted in a general pardon for all involved in
crimes committed under the dictatorship, although 475 people were killed
or disappeared during that period, a government study found.

>Among the disappeared

Morris was briefly one of those who disappeared.

The Northern Illinois pastor first went to Brazil in 1963 as a
missionary with the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries and was
assigned to the Methodist Church in Brazil. From 1970 to 1974, he worked
closely with Dom Helder Camara, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Recife
and Olinda.

In 1974, Morris was on a leave of absence from his missionary service
and managing a factory in Recife but still associated with Camara, known
as Dom Helder, a leading opponent of the dictatorship. Dom Helder was
their target, but Morris said the military asked torture victims who
didn't know the archbishop about "Pastor Fred."

He never found out who made false accusations against him to the
military. "That's one of the best arguments I know for the U.S. not
using torture as a means of stamping out terrorism," he said. "People
will say anything you want to hear."

During the same period, Time magazine published a positive story about
the archbishop and his struggle for human rights for people of Brazil.
"They knew in their investigation that I was a stringer for Time and The
Associated Press ... so they assumed I wrote the story," he said.

Morris had several meetings that summer with military intelligence and
thought they were satisfied of his innocence-until he was abducted on
Sept. 30. "They waited until the archbishop left the country," Morris
recalled. "He went to Rome for a synod meeting."

Over four days, Morris was tortured through beatings and electric shock
and questioned about one of his friends, but mostly about the
archbishop. "They were trying to get me to confess that I was the
connection between him and the Communist Party of Brazil," he said,
dismissing the claim as "absurd."

>Public outcry

The day of Morris' abduction, Tereza Cristina Assis Carvalho, whom he
married at the end of 1974, "realized that I had been disappeared" and
laid the groundwork for the outcry that led to his release. "She was
very heroic and literally saved my life," Morris said.

He also credited the support of Richard Brown, then the U.S. consul in
Recife, and John Crimmins, who was the U.S. ambassador in Brasilia.

United Methodists rallied behind the call for his release. "My father
was pastor at that time of the largest Methodist church in Nebraska," he
said. The Rev. Hughes B. Morris Sr., as well as his brother, the Rev.
Hughes Morris Jr., helped generate more than a thousand letters and
telephone calls to members of the U.S. Congress from Nebraska.

In addition, 100 of the 535 members of the House of Representatives were
United Methodist. "When they started hearing that a Methodist missionary
was being tortured, they started putting the pressure on," he said.

After 17 days, Morris was released. "(The Brazilian government) found it
more convenient to expel me than to keep me in prison," he said. "They
never bothered to charge me." Later, he became aware that the Brazilian
Army, which originally had called him a Communist, had spread the rumor
that he was a CIA agent.

Morris gave numerous television interviews and wrote a first-person
account of his experience for the Nov. 18, 1974, edition of Time, titled
"Torture, Brazilian Style."

Testifying before Congress, Morris said "torture brutalizes and
dehumanizes not only those who are tortured but those who torture, those
who are intimidated by the torture of others and those who try to ignore
the fact that torture exists."

Morris moved to Costa Rica in 1976. He later served in United Methodist
churches in the Chicago area and, after retiring as a pastor, returned
to Brazil for two years in 1995. He was executive director of the
Florida Council of Churches, dean of the Orlando Campus of the South
Florida Center for Theological Studies and director of Latin American
relations for the National Council of Churches.

>File for damages

In 2002, Morris heard that the current government of Brazil was allowing
former torture victims to file suit for damages. He hired a lawyer to
start the process but "never assumed he was going to produce anything."

At the end of August, Morris was contacted by the vice president of the
Justice Ministry's Amnesty Commission and, in less than a month, was in
Brasilia with other torture survivors for an event honoring the 100th
anniversary of the late archbishop's birth. Dom Helder died in 1999.

Morris was allowed to speak at the Sept. 26 public ceremony. "They gave
me 10 minutes and I took about 25," he said.

Morris traveled to Brasilia with his wife of 24 years, Argentina. Also
attending were Carvalho, from whom he was divorced, and their children,
Erick Morris, who lives in Sao Paulo, and Jessica Morris, a law
professor at the University of Miami and a member of the board of
directors of Amnesty International USA. Morris has five other children.

Morris said he founded Faith Partners of the Americas at the end of 2004
"wanting to build on my 40 years of experience in Latin America.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any funding for it." Faith Partners
is a nonprofit organization dedicated to build solidarity between the
churches and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean and those in
North America.

On Nov. 1, he and his wife are scheduled to move to Nicaragua, where she
has extended family. They plan to revitalize Faith Partners by
developing an ecumenical environmental education program with a
theological twist for Sunday schools.

*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service news writer based in New York.

News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York, (646) 369-3759 or
newsdesk@umcom.org.

>********************

United Methodist News Service Photos and stories also available at: http://umns.umc.org

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