Carlos Carmelo de Vasconcelos Motta

Styles of Carlos Carmelo Vasconcellos Motta
Reference style	His Eminence
Spoken style	Your Eminence
Informal style	Cardinal
See	São Paulo Aparecida

Carlos Carmelo Vasconcellos Motta (July 16, 1890, Bom Jesus do Amparo, archdiocese of Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil – September 18, 1982, Aparecida, São Paulo, Brazil) was a long-serving cardinal. Until Eugênio de Araújo Sales surpassed him in 2005, he was the longest-serving Brazilian cardinal, and during his cardinalate the Church in Brazil underwent tremendous expansion, involving the development of many new movements that were to develop after he had largely disappeared from the scene.

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 in São Paulo in 1944.

With his appointment as a cardinal after Pope Pius XII felt for the first time in his pontificate that a consistory was feasible (due to the hositilities caused by World War II, it was argued, a consistory was impossible between 1939 and 1945), 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. he was the effective leader of the First General Conference of South American Bishops in 1955.

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