Cardinal Eugenio de Araujo Sales Sales was born on November 8 1920 into an upper-class Brazilian family. Ordained as a priest in 1943, he was elevated to Cardinal by Pope Paul VI in 1969. In 1971 he became Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, a position he held until his retirement in 2001. Sales was no fan of "liberation theology." He proscribed the so-called base communities (laity-led, grassroots, mostly quasi-Marxist Church groups which sprang up in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s). He refused to allow the Left to make the running on social issues, explaining in an early interview: "Christians are also revolutionaries, and they have a much better alternative for social progress. With the authentic application of the Gospel, we will bring about a deep change in society without a revolution in the Communist sense, without putting class against class, without hate and without bloodshed. In the early 1960s, as Bishop and Apostolic Administrator of Natal, a city in the country's impoverished rural north-east, he founded a Rural Assistance Service run by clergy and lay volunteers which founded radio schools to tackle the problem of illiteracy and maternity centres to reduce maternal and infant mortality. For the workers there were co-operatives, credit unions and labour unions. Later, as Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, he created dedicated ministries for prison inmates, for young people and residents of the shanty towns that surround the city. Shortly before he retired Sales revealed that, between 1976 and 1982, when the respective juntas then ruling Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay collaborated in the eradication of political opponents, he had used the resources of the archdiocese to help some 5,000 dissidents, lodging them in rented apartments or securing their safe passage abroad. Sales explained that because of his good relations with the Brazilian military, the regime had turned a blind eye to his activities: "They would pretend not to know anything. I would let them know everything. I would use the red telephone and say: 'Hello, [General Silvio] Frota, if anyone tells you that I am protecting Communists, know that it's true and I'm responsible. After the fall of the dictatorship, under the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, Sales, who described himself as the Pope's "Xerox copy," became the Brazilian Church's most prominent voice for traditional Catholic values. From then on no carnival season in Rio was allowed to pass without a jeremiad from the archbishop against sexual libertinism from the archbishop. He even proposed that the event should be replaced with a "festival of prayer," observing that the money squandered on costumes, floats and general excess could be put to better use if it went towards helping abandoned street children. But not only were Sales's efforts ignored, they also sometimes proved counterproductive. In 2001, when he filed a complaint with Rio's city council, following the announcement that the Hedonism Club of Brazil was planning to hold a three-day "sex marathon" at a beachside "sauna club," demand for tickets for the event jumped from 1,500 to 6,000. Cardinal Eugênio de Araújo Sales, born November 8 1920, died July 9 2012