In the room in Brooklyn where he was staying, along with birthday cards he had just received, the young archbishop from Brazil left photographs from his travels in a stack on a desk. One is a shot of Tower Bridge in London, and another shows him outside a government building in Oklahoma City.
Somewhere, he had played in a field of snow.
The archbishop, José Ricardo Ferreira de Souza, 31, had been a nomad since he was a teenager, his friends said, and had helped homeless and troubled people from Buenos Aires to Brooklyn as the leader of a tiny, independent Catholic church.
Two weeks ago, his traveling ministry came to a violent end.
The police said that on the night of Sept. 28, Mr. de Souza, a rail-thin man whose vestments seemed to swallow him, fought with several men on the Boardwalk at Brighton Beach and was seen being dragged towards the ocean.
A little while later a passer-by spotted his strangled body in the Atlantic surf. He was missing his wallet, his cellphone and his shoes, his family said.
Mr. de Souza had been in Brooklyn for just a few months, according to Edward and Shirley, a married couple with whom he was friends and who asked that their last names not be published because they feared for their safety.
On his latest visit, they gave him their bedroom — they slept in the living room — where he spent hours on the computer, listening to Spanish pop music or watching “Caso Cerrado,” or “Case Closed,” on Telemundo.
No one has been arrested in the killing, and the police did not say whether there were any suspects. But they noted that the fight took place in an area where men gather to drink.
Shirley said she wondered if Mr. de Souza had been trying to help those who ended up robbing and killing him.
Another friend, Claudio Baz, said he last spoke with Mr. de Souza on the night he was killed. The two met in Buenos Aires seven years ago, where Mr. de Souza was ordained, and established the Vetero Catholic Church in New York, Mr. Baz said.
Influenced by the worldwide independent Old Catholic movement, a group of churches that oppose some of the Vatican’s teachings, their church focused on missionary work.
For a time, a church in Queens lent them space, said Mr. Baz, but now the church has no physical home.
Lately, Mr. Baz said, the two had focused on community-based social work, including helping the homeless and people with AIDS.
Besides serving the church, Mr. Baz is a freelance designer, and Mr. de Souza worked at a law office in Brooklyn.
According to Julie Byrne, an associate professor of religion at Hofstra University, South America has a rich history of independent Catholic churches, including the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church, started in 1945 by Carlos Duarte Costa, who allowed his priests to marry and said Mass in Portuguese. He harshly criticized what he believed was the Roman Catholic Church’s lack of support for the poor, and he was excommunicated.
Dr. Byrne said that she was not familiar with Mr. de Souza’s church, but that the number of independent Catholic churches was growing. Followers, including former Roman Catholics, were drawn to the churches’ embrace of both Catholic identity and their outreach toward other Christian and non-Christian groups.
“They have been a haven for people who want Christian homes and progressive values,” Dr. Byrne said.
Because of his beliefs, Mr. de Souza had experienced a “lot of problems,” with the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil and Colombia, Mr. Baz said. Two years ago, Mr. de Souza told a Texas newspaper that he was seeking asylum in the United States because his life was threatened by what the article called a “church-related mafia in Brazil with ties to drug dealers and the Colombian FARC.”
The letters are the Spanish abbreviation for a leftist guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, that has been fighting a long-running civil war there.
In the end, those tensions might have mattered little, and Mr. de Souza’s death might simply have been the violent end to a chance encounter. One of his sisters, Silvana Ferreira de Souza, said she and her four siblings wanted justice for their brother. She spoke in a telephone interview from the Brazilian city of Recife that was translated by Shirley.
Sitting on Mr. de Souza’s bed, Shirley smoked a cigarette and talked about the night he was killed.
She had spent most of the evening with Mr. de Souza, and they left their apartment in Gravesend about 7 p.m. to shop on Brighton Beach Avenue. Shirley remembered seeing three men who appeared to be homeless.
She and Mr. de Souza returned home, and a few hours later, Mr. de Souza said he was going out again to buy soda. Shirley gave him money to buy her cigarettes. He did not return.
It was only later that she wondered whether he had gone to find the three men.
Mr. Baz said that the state Crime Victims Board had contributed thousands of dollars toward funeral expenses, but that Mr. de Souza’s family still did not have enough money to fly his body home to Recife.
“Someone took a life as beautiful as his, and it’s horrible,” he said.
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(Source: NYT)