Who was Antônio Conselheiro?

An ordinary man first

He was born Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel on March 13, 1830, in Quixeramobim, a town in the backlands of Ceará, in Brazil’s Northeast. His father was a merchant. The son tried one trade after another, shop clerk, schoolteacher, court clerk, and settled into none. In 1861 his wife left him. In the years that followed he began to walk the sertão, the dry backlands, praying. The house where he was born still stands, a listed building.

Why “Conselheiro”

By the 1870s he was a familiar figure in the backlands of Sergipe and Bahia: a thin man in a long blue tunic and sandals, his beard down to his waist. He slept on a plank, lived on alms and refused anything beyond what he needed. He was not a priest and gave no sacraments. He preached and gave counsel, and people began calling him the Conselheiro, “the Counselor.” Readers in the capital heard of him in 1876:

There has appeared in the northern backlands an individual who calls himself Antônio Conselheiro and who wields great influence over the minds of the common people, using his mysterious appearance and ascetic habits to impress their ignorance and simplicity.

That is the city looking at the backlands: a strange man who impresses the ignorant. His followers saw someone else.

A crime that never happened

That same year police arrested him in the town of Itapicuru, in Bahia, saying he had killed his mother and his wife. It was a lie. His escort beat him on the long road to Ceará, and he did not complain. There the charge collapsed. Freed, he was back in Bahia within the year, and his fame tripled. People still ask whether he killed his mother. He did not: the charge fell apart in 1876.

Builder of the backlands

Then came the Great Drought of 1877 to 1879, which killed somewhere between a hundred thousand and half a million people in the Northeast. The Conselheiro answered with work. He gathered the poor to rebuild cemetery walls, raise chapels and dig reservoirs. At Chorrochó, in Bahia, he began a church in 1877 that was finished in 1885, as its plaque records. No one was paid: there was food, prayer and a place in the world, and he kept nothing for himself.

In a land of few owners, rare priests and, after slavery ended in 1888, freed people with nothing, he became a guide and the godfather of many children. The Church grew uneasy. In 1882 the archbishop of Bahia banned him from preaching in churches, and in 1887 asked the government to stop him.

Belo Monte and the end

When the Republic, proclaimed in 1889, separated Church and State, he preached against it. In June 1893 he settled with his followers at Canudos, on the Vaza-Barris River, and renamed it Belo Monte. It grew to 5,200 houses before the army destroyed it in 1897, a story told in What was the War of Canudos?. He left two handwritten notebooks of sermons, from 1895 and 1897. No photograph of him alive exists: the newspapers of 1897 drew him from hearsay. He died inside the besieged town on September 22, 1897, of a wound and dysentery, two weeks before it fell.