Religion: The Bible in Brazil

For the first time ever, a U.S. Protestant missionary was given Brazil’s Order of the Southern Cross in Rio de Janeiro this week. Recipient : the Rev. Dr. Hugh Clarence Tucker, 86. The Brazilian Government honored the short, bald, Methodist minister for 57 years of untiring activity in Brazil.

Dr. Tucker was 28 when he stepped ashore at Rio in 1886. He came straight from his native Tennessee, where he and his ten brothers and sisters were born in a one-room log house. But from the moment he set eyes on Brazil, he felt at home.

Dr. Tucker’s first jobs were to open a church, help organize Brazil’s first Methodist Conference. With two other ministers Dr. Tucker formed the Conference, which was Methodism’s smallest.

Then Dr. Tucker began to hunt another job. He found it a year later when he became the American Bible Society’s agent in Brazil. He learned to speak Portuguese, and with a group of enthusiasts spent four years distributing the Bible to the 15% of Brazil’s 14,000,000 people who could then read. First he tackled cities on the railroads. Where the rails ended, Dr. Tucker moved on by stagecoach, oxcart, horseback, river boat. Sometimes he was welcomed; sometimes he was told to keep going. Once he was stoned. But Dr. Tucker figures that since he went to Brazil he has distributed some 2,500,000 Bibles in Portuguese, Italian, German, Polish, English, Arabic. Ten years ago Dr. Tucker opened Rio de Janeiro’s $175,000, nine-story Bible House, in which he still has a top-floor office. The walls are lined with pigeonholes filled with tracts on such evils as gambling, smoking.

Running his Union Church and handing out Bibles did not keep Dr. Tucker busy enough. So he also helped organize Brazil’s first Y.M.C.A., first Sunday School Union, first anti-tuberculosis campaign. Through his efforts Rio got its first public .playground, its first social-service center (Institute de Povo), its first hospital.

When Dr. Tucker first went to Brazil, yellow-fever epidemics killed about 100 people a day in Rio de Janeiro. With Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, Rio’s public-health head, Dr. Tucker also started a clean-up campaign, got rid of mosquitoes. After the campaign, yellow fever practically disappeared.