HELDER CAMARA E AS IDEOLOGIAS DA MISÉRIA: CRÍTICAS POLÍTICAS E TEOLÓGICAS AO MALTHUSIANISMO

This article analyzes four speeches by Dom Helder Camara, delivered between 1968 and 1978, as a categorical refutation of the fatalism of Malthusian theory and its later versions, which attributed hunger to natural scarcity and uncontrolled population growth. The introduction begins with the historical context of the post-war period and dictatorial regimes, highlighting how Dom Helder became a dissenting voice by denouncing the naturalization of misery and defending an economy focused on life. The central objective is to demonstrate how his words achieve an epistemological and ethical shift by removing hunger from the sphere of demographic fatality and repositioning it as an expression of "social sin" and "mother-violence," linked to historical structures of domination and dependence. The methodology articulates a hermeneutical and critical reading of Dom Helder's speeches, analyzed by Luiz Carlos Luz Marques and Lucy da Silva Pina Neta in the chapter "Helder Camara e La Pace," included in the book *Quam Pulchri – Settanta saggi per i settant’anni del Cardinale Matteo Zuppi*, organized by Nicla Buonasorte and Alberto Melloni (2025), based on the theoretical frameworks of Karl Marx, Josué de Castro, and Enrique Dussel. The structural perspective of Marx and Castro allows us to understand hunger as a historical product of production relations and center-periphery dependency, while Dussel's Ethics of Liberation grounds Helder's imperative to listen to the "Other" and transform structures of exclusion. As a result, a synthesis between spirituality and political action is identified in Dom Helder's speeches, in which faith assumes an emancipatory dimension. This analysis shows that the critique of Malthusianism is not limited to the economic field, but constitutes a historical gesture of denouncing injustices legitimized by science and announcing a new rationality based on solidarity and social justice. It concludes that Dom Helder can be understood, in light of the concept formulated by Luiz Carlos Luz Marques (2012), as a social operator of the sacred, a historical subject who translated the sacred into liberating practice and transformed faith into an instrument of justice and humanization. His legacy remains an ethical and theological reference for contemporary struggles against hunger and in defense of human dignity. Keywords: Dom Helder Camara; Hunger; Malthusianism.