The man who might have been Pope

ONE day a little over fifty years ago, amid the gentle hills of the countryside of southern Brazil – with its crimson clay soil and mellowed forests, its grazing cows and corn fields – three children were playing. They had few toys. The family, who were not rich, had settled on the land five years earlier, having built a basic wooden house and cleared an area of forest to allow them to grow food to eat.

But the children had imagination – and an intense ambition instilled in them by a devout Catholic father who, despite himself leaving school aged ten, wanted only for his children to study. The oldest of the three, 11-year-old Flávio, wanted to be a teacher. The next, Lotário, nine, wanted to be a doctor. And the youngest, seven-year-old Odilo, wanted to be a priest.

Flávio remembers: “So we used to dress up as best we could. Odilo was already an altar boy at our local church so already had a smock like a priest’s. He would get a glass of redcurrant juice, which he would pretend was holy wine while the two of us would kneel in front of him and wave palm leaves. I remember it like it was yesterday, Odilo, with a stern, serious face, looking down on us and repeating ‘Dominus vobiscum, Dominus vobiscum’ in Latin (‘The Lord be with you, the Lord be with you.’)”

The children all fulfilled or surpassed their dreams. Flávio, now 67, became a teacher. Lotário, now 65, became a doctor. And last week, 6,254 miles from the farm the family still own near Toledo, in Brazil’s Paraná state, in the opulence and splendour of the Sistine Chapel, Odilo, 63, almost became Pope. Cardinal Dom Odilo Scherer, Archbishop of SĂŁo Paulo – to use his full title – was considered one of the pre-conclave favourites but ended up missing out to Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina.

The week before the Papal election began in the Vatican, I traced the history of Dom Odilo and his staunchly proud family back to the distant corners of southern Brazil – more than 800 miles from the beaches, glamour and crime of the most famous image of the country, Rio de Janeiro.

The countryside around the Scherer family farm in Dois Irmãos, Paraná

In a four-hour interview, interspersed with laughter and tears, his brother Flávio spoke of their childhood together, the family’s tragedies and why Odilo has a “special connection” with Britain. The retired teacher and education official is, like his brother, a pillar of the community around Toledo, a town of 120,000 in Brazil’s prosperous south. Mainly settled by immigrants from Europe, you could easily believe the town, its countryside, people and climate were set in the heart of that continent.

So it is perhaps not surprising that the story of Dom Odilo Pedro Scherer, who was born on 21 September 1949, actually begins almost a century earlier, deep in the Rhineland of western Germany. His great grandfather Mathias Scherer emigrated, aged 16, from the city of Tholey, in Saarland, to Brazil with his sister Elisabeth and her husband in 1872. They settled in the country’s southern-most state, Rio Grande do Sul, along with many other German, Polish and Italian migrants.

Three generations on, the family were still there, and in 1949 Odilo was born to Edwino and Francisca Scherer in a village, Linha São Francisco, founded by a group of German Catholics. He was the seventh of 13 children born between 1939, when his mother was 22, and 1962, when she was 45.“Though there were 13 of us, she loved each one of us with everything in her heart,” Flávio said.

Cardinal Dom Odilo Scherer with his two parents and ten of his siblings in a family photograph from 1964. Odilo is top row, second from the left.

Even before Odilo’s birth, the family had bought a plot of land in Paraná, two states north, after finding their farm fractured by inheritance and plagued by ants destroying their crops. After Odilo was born, his father spent two years at the plot about 15 miles outside Toledo, a town which itself had only just been founded, clearing trees and building a basic wooden house.

In 1951, they moved in to become the second family in the vicinity. As the area was marked by the presence of two streams, the new village was christened Dois Irmãos – or Two Brothers. The village would, over the intervening decades, grow to have a population of about 1,000.

“Our family were pioneers,” Flávio said. “At first, we farmed for our own subsistence. Then, slowly, we ended up growing and producing enough to be able to sell some as well. It was very hard work for all the family, especially when we had to harvest before the introduction of mechanised farming equipment in the 1960s, but it was fun at the same time.”


The farmhouse in the village of Dois IrmĂŁos where Cardinal Dom Odilo Scherer spent his childhood.

The family grew corn, manioc, beans and rice. They reared chickens and cows. In the early years, much effort was put into clearing forest for the farm, which would reach about 100 hectares. It would not be until 1957 that the family replaced their wooden house with one made of stone – the first in the area.

There can be no doubting the impact Odilo’s father, Edwino, had on his son. While a strict, sometimes harsh, influence, “his principles – study, religion and discipline – are imprinted on all of us,” Flávio said. He made clear his children had a choice. Either they were to study and progress themselves – or they could labour on the family farm to allow their siblings the freedom to be educated.

Cardinal Dom Odilo Scherer pictured with three of his brothers in a family photograph from 1964. Left to right: Paulino, Odilo, Lotário, Flávio.

Around the table for breakfast or dinner, Edwino would lecture his children about the importance of education. “He had only studied until he was ten but he was a person who read widely and self-taught,” Flávio said. “He would encourage us to take study and religion very seriously. “He would tell us: ‘My children, you must study, study, study. The land may not be enough for you to live on in the future. But if you study you can go further and then nobody can steal that from you.’”

The family would rise at 7am. The children who were old enough would help to feed the chickens and milk the cows. At breakfast Edwino would sit at the head of the table drinking a herb-infused mate called chimarrao through a metal straw.

At 8am, they would set off across the open fields to school. The Scherer children were among the first attendees at the Princesa Isabel primary school, which opened in 1953 on land donated by their father. It was here, in the lone classroom shared by children aged from seven to 11, that religious scholars would tutor them in reading, writing, arithmetic and the bible.

The primary school only had lessons in the morning. In the afternoon, the children would help more around the farm – feeding animals, collecting the harvest and taking food and water for the labourers. And every Sunday, the family would go to mass at the Our Lady of the Rosary church in Dois Irmãos, which – like the primary school – had been built on land donated by their father.

The Our Lady of the Rosary church in the village of Dois IrmĂŁos, where Cardinal Dom Odilo Scherer gave his first mass on 8 December, 1976. The church is less than a mile from the farm where he grew up.

Their mother, Francisca, also had a distinct impact on him. While Edwino was a strict, dominant figure who demanded ambition and progress, their mother was a softer presence, who smoothed the inevitable hardship of young children growing up helping to make ends meet on a working farm. Her soothing tones were most often heard in German – effectively the family’s native tongue. As well as the toughness of physical labour, the family also faced, at least theoretically, a threat from wild animals in the vicinity.

“Whenever there was a Midnight Mass,” Flávio remembers, “We would have to walk across the fields in the pitch dark, despite the presence of rattlesnakes, jaguars, and other deadly creatures. The boys would go in front, the girls behind. Our mother would have us sing hymns and folk songs in German all the way, in the hope of scaring off any wild beasts. There never was any question of us not going to church.

“It is this hardship that gave Odilo his great respect for nature. But we enjoyed very much being close to the woods and the animals. It is why my brother has always taken the environment very seriously. Every day, when we were sent to collect water from a nearby stream, our mother would warn us to watch out for rattlesnakes,” Flávio said. “She would even smear garlic on our legs to keep them away.”

Flávio Scherer, brother of Cardinal Dom Odilo Scherer, at his home in Toledo.

Her caution was understandable as her tenderness had already twice been tinged with tragedy. Their older sister Norma, who was born seven years before Odilo, in 1942, died just two months later when a venomous brown recluse spider crept into her cot and bit her. “Our parents grieved, but they kept themselves strong for the rest of the children,” Flávio said.

Then, when Odilo was five or six, in 1955, his younger sister, Ana Maria, died aged two after a pan of boiling water fell off a wood stove, scalding her to death. “Both girls are buried with our mother and father in Dois Irmãos,” Flávio said. “We still think of them.”

Even before adolescence, Odilo was being singled out for the church. Just before his 11th birthday, Dom Armando CĂ­rio – then bishop of Toledo, who went on to be Odilo’s mentor – visited the village school. According to family legend, he was so impressed that – in lieu of there being a suitable seminary in Toledo – he invited the young scholar to study with him in his own house.

This he did from 1961 to 1964, before heading off to a boarding school in Curitiba, 300 miles away. “He, like several of us, left the family very early,” Flávio said. “But the marks of the family are still printed in us for the rest of our lives. We are very humble and respectful. We try to make the world better and try to make a contribution to society. Odilo really admired and looked up to his father.

“Many of us ended up at religious schools far from home. I remember that Odilo would cry in bed on the night before the morning of March 1, as that was the day that term started. We had no telephones, but we would all write to each other all of the time.” Over the next decade and a half, Odilo would study at universities and seminaries across the south of Brazil, but never lost his closeness to his family.

Despite most of children going onto religious schools, only Odilo showed a serious interest in his father’s greatest ambition for his children – the priesthood. When he was ready to commit, he returned to the family village of Dois IrmĂŁos. He was ordained by his mentor, Armando CĂ­rio, at the Our Lady of Glory church in Quatro Pontes (Four Points), the neighbouring village to his home, on 7 December, 1976. The next day, he gave his first mass at his home church of Our Lady of the Rosary in Dois IrmĂŁos – that his father had donated the land for decades before – on 8 December, the day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Cardinal Dom Odilo Scherer gives his first mass at the church of Our Lady of the Rosary in Dois IrmĂŁos on 8 December, 1976.

From there, the church took him even further afield, and in 1989 he was studying for a doctorate at the Vatican, but took time out during the summer to study English in London and Ireland. “In that year,” Flávio said. “His father became ill. He had a stroke as a result of his diabetes and he ended up never recovering. On 17 July 1989, I called him in the Vatican from the hospital and asked him to come. He did, but once the doctor said he was stable, he went back to Rome.

“But on 1 September, both Odilo and I separately had premonitions that he had died. Mine was when I drove through a town called ParaĂ­so do Norte (North Paradise). Soon after that, Odilo called me and told me he hadn’t been able to sleep the night before – and he was worried that meant something had happened to our father. He was right – he had died, aged 73.

Odilo was in London at the time and, for him, it was a very special moment with the British people. He gave a mass and was in tears as he asked for the congregation to join him in his prayers as it was the day of his father’s funeral, which he could not make. He felt a lot of love and prayers from the British people there. He felt they cared and he was comforted. It was a very touching moment.”

As his career rose – spending 1994 to 2001 as an official at the Vatican – Odilo would still try to make it home to Toledo several times a year, often staying with Flávio in his modest bungalow. One positive effect of him not becoming Pope is the difficulty he would have had discreetly returning home. “The Pope cannot just jump on a plane for a private trip, especially not to a huge Catholic country like Brazil, and especially not to a small town like ours,” Flávio said. “I rejoiced at the election of His Holiness Pope Francisco; especially as he is Latin American.”

Despite his increasingly senior duties, Odilo has remained down-to-earth, according to his family – remaining keen on technology, photography – and supporting a local football team in São Paulo, the city of which he has been archbishop since 2007.

And he remained close to his family. After a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, during which she was nursed for years at the family farm by his brother Bruno, his mother Francisca died on 2 January, 2006, aged 88. This time, Odilo was present and anointed her during her final hours, in the hospital in the Paraná town of Palotina where his brother, Lotário, the doctor, worked. The next day, Odilo took the mass as she was buried in the cemetery in Dois IrmĂŁos, next to her husband and the two girls who had died in infancy, Norma and Ana Maria.

Cardinal Dom Odilo Scherer pictured with his late mother Francisca Wilma Steffens Scherer, at her home in Dois IrmĂŁos in 2003.

Two days earlier, on New Years Eve, Flávio, the teacher, Lotário, the doctor, Odilo, the priest, and all the other surviving children of the humble, proud farmer and his wife, had gathered by her hospital bed. Together, they sang the hymns, folk songs and prayers in German that she had taught them years ago. “Even though she could not speak or open her eyes,” Flávio said. “We could see that she was crying.”

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