Originally from a small village in the state of
Minas Gerais, the future Cardinal gained his education in the local seminary in the city of Mariana. He was ordained in 1918, and spent much of the next fifteen years in the
state capital of
Belo Horizonte as a seminary rector. He became a bishop in 1932, but only of a
titular see. His first proper appointment as a diocesan bishop was to the
Archdiocese of São Luis in the remote state of
Maranhão three years later, but Motta attracted no wider attention until he was promoted to Brazil's most prestigious see of
São Paulo in 1944. With his appointment as a cardinal by
Pope Pius XII in the
consistory of 18 February 1946, Motta became effectively the leader of the Church in Brazil for the next twenty years or so until a new generation of leaders (Sales,
Arns,
Lorscheider) emerged. In this role, Cardinal Motta was faced with the difficult task of what policy to take when confronted with widespread anguish at the great social inequality so characteristic of Brazil. In the 1950s, he became the first archbishop in the Catholic Church to regularly hold episcopal synods – something that became regular practice after
Vatican II. Amongst his closest pupils was the latterly famous
Hélder Câmara. On the other side, Motta had to contend with the ultra-right-wing group
Tradition, Family and Property, which aimed to win him over with a still-extant letter in 1956. Regarded as a quiet man who did not like publicity, Motta's reply has characteristically not survived. Motta was the effective leader of the First General Conference of South American Bishops in 1955. Motta attended the sessions of the
Second Vatican Council and was transferred to the see of Aparecida in 1964. His role in the Church declined significantly after this, however, as new generations of Church leaders contended with the problems of Brazil's 1964
military coup. He participated in the
conclaves of
1958 and
1963, but lost his right to participate by being older than eighty in 1971. When he died in 1982, Motta had been a cardinal longer than anyone else living. He was the third-last surviving cardinal elevated by Pope Pius XII behind
Paul-Émile Léger and
Giuseppe Siri, and the last surviving cardinal elevated in the 1946 consistory. ==External links==