Jean Bellini is a nun who believes that God made us free, and that we’ve used our freedom poorly. We’ve used it to create colonialism, capitalism, and other systems that exploit the poor and reward the rich; we’ve used it to build a world in which some people have too much and others have nothing. Now, we’re in a fix. When terrible things happen, Bellini sometimes hears people say that they might turn out all right, “God willing.” She thinks, I wouldn’t put that burden on God. He made us free, and it’s not His job to save us.

Bellini does believe that God gives everyone a vocation. Hers is to help others help themselves. In 1976, when she was thirty-three, she decided to move from upstate New York to Brazil, where her Rochester-based congregation had a small outpost. She had learned that Brazil’s military dictatorship had decided to make room for all kinds of commercial enterprises in the Amazon rain forest: a cattle ranch owned by Volkswagen, a rubber plantation for Goodyear. The problem was that lots of people, from indigenous groups to squatting farmers, already lived in the Amazon. They were being kicked off their land and the forest was being destroyed.

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

When Catholicism arrived in Brazil, in 1500, it was cruel to the people it found there. Portuguese colonists claimed a religious imprimatur, baptizing the people they enslaved to sell the forest for parts. “From the moment Columbus set foot in the New World cross and sword had been indistinguishable,” the Catholic investigative journalist Penny Lernoux wrote, in her book “Cry of the People”; by the time Brazil declared independence from Portugal, in 1822, the Latin American Church was “the most conservative political force on the continent.” In 1964, when Brazil’s military took power, the nation’s bishops greeted the generals warmly. “Look behind a dictator; there stands a bishop,” Lernoux wrote.

And yet, when Bellini arrived, she encountered a fractured Brazilian Church that was, in many of its parishes, revising its thinking. The Pastoral Land Commission (C.P.T.), a new Catholic group founded by bishops, was organizing Brazil’s landless to claim the land denied to them; its mission was to document all land conflicts and, where it could, offer guidance. The C.P.T.’s job did not end when, in 1985, Brazil’s military dictatorship concluded and gave way to a succession of flawed democratic governments. In the fall of 2018, voters elected President Jair Bolsonaro, a populist ex-military politician determined to pillage the Amazon. About a million square miles of the forest fall within Brazilian territory; as Jon Lee Anderson wrote recently, in this magazine, its “destruction has become a kind of perverse political goal” for Bolsonaro. He has weakened regulatory agencies, sought new legislation to prioritize mining and drilling, and accused environmentalists of neocolonialism. Indigenous people, he has said, are a “chicken pox” upon the rain forest.

This rhetoric has invited profiteers to break the law; since Bolsonaro took office, thousands of fires, many set by prospectors, have deforested and devastated the Amazon. The C.P.T. documented thirty deaths in disputes over land rights last year. It has started running security workshops, advising volunteers who work in conflict environments to communicate on the encrypted messaging service Signal and choose their car mechanics carefully. The situation is so dire that, this past fall, a hundred and eighty-five bishops met for twenty-one days, at the Vatican, for a synod on the Amazon region; there, they declared that supporting its displaced people is a “requirement of faith.” The Church, in 2020, is determined to be non-colonial. The communities who call the forest home, the bishops wrote, “know how to take care of the Amazon, how to love and protect it,” and it is the Church’s job “to accompany them, to walk with them, and not to impose on them a particular way of being.”

On a Sunday morning in August, Bellini, who is seventy-six, was in her bedroom in Goiânia, Brazil, packing a rolling suitcase for a flight to the Amazon. She is about five feet tall, with curly white hair and an unlined, narrow face. She is now an executive at the C.P.T., which had just hired new staff in Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazonas State. In 2018, there were more than a thousand conflicts over land in Brazil, almost half of them in the Amazon; the C.P.T. has a staff, most of them volunteers, of about seven hundred, but until recently it had only a single employee in Manaus. Bellini was going there to see how the new hires were doing. She chose three pillows for her bad back: one for the plane and two for the twin bed in which she’d be sleeping, at a local seminary. Then she went to the kitchen to fix some breakfast.

Bellini lives with Sister Maureen Finn and Sister Joana Mendes, who belong to her congregation, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Rochester. The congregation, which has nine women in Brazil, built the house in 2012. It has solar panels, a prayer room strung with paper cranes, and a small library containing books by Latin America’s liberation theologians and the Dalai Lama. The women find themselves talking a lot about Bolsonaro.

“He said a really disgusting thing yesterday,” Finn said, opening a newspaper on the kitchen table. “I can’t even repeat it.”

“It was that people should pollute less by shitting less,” Bellini said. She took out of the refrigerator a big dish of yogurt mixed with milk—an experiment in making the pricier product go further.

On Sundays, Bellini attends mass at Our Lady of the Earth, an octagonal church named for a symbolic champion of Brazil’s rural poor, represented in images as a chin-up, dark-skinned woman who looks nothing like classical depictions of the Virgin Mary. We parked in front of a nail salon, crossed the street, and slid into the second row of pews. A man played guitar as the congregants clapped and swayed; when the music got really peppy, Bellini tapped her foot. Then the priest stepped down from the altar to give his homily, in Portuguese.

Afterward, in the car, Bellini summarized what the priest had said: God won’t help you, so help one another; you might not see the results of your work before you die, but it’s meaningful anyway, because the people born after you matter just as much as you do. This was a creed of which Bellini approved. It was Father’s Day in Brazil, and stores were closed; the red-and-gold signs for the Assemblies of God—the Pentecostal denomination into which Bolsonaro was baptized before his Presidential run, although he remains a Catholic—stood out against abandoned construction sites and squat, concrete buildings. In recent years, Brazilian Catholicism has been in decline, and Pentecostalism ascendant. “They focus on ‘Our condition is sinful, and we need redemption,’ ” Bellini argued, of the Assemblies of God. Wearing sunglasses over her regular glasses, she shifted gears with effort. She recounted how, soon after Bolsonaro took office and started cutting social services, an acquaintance who attended the Assemblies of God suggested that the resulting hardships, and also the Amazon fires and displaced families, were “signs of the end of times.”

“ ‘Follow these rules and you’re saved,’ ” Bellini went on, summarizing the Assemblies’ outlook. “It keeps the poor in their place.” If she had her way, those who have been denied their share of the Earth will see that this situation is not God’s plan. They will join together and create the just and equal world that God desires. From the left, a car without the right of way merged suddenly into our lane, cutting us off. Bellini whistled in frustration and gave it a hard stare.