[4] Câmara was named auxiliary bishop of Rio de Janeiro by Pope Pius XII on 3 March 1952.

[5] During his first years as a priest he was a supporter of the far-right Brazilian Integralist Action (Ação Integralista Brasileira, AIB), an ideological choice that he later rejected.

He also founded two social organizations: the Ceará Legion of Work, in 1931, and the Women Workers' Catholic Union, in 1933.

[7] In 1959, he founded Banco da Providência in Rio de Janeiro, a philanthropic organization to fight poverty and social injustice by facilitating the contraction of loans by poorer populations.

[10] With other clerics, he encouraged peasants to free themselves from their conventional fatalistic outlook by studying the gospels in small groups and proposing the search for social change from their readings.

[6] On 16 November 1965, a few days before the council ended, 40 bishops led by Câmara met at night in the Catacombs of Domitilla outside Rome.

[8] Câmara spoke out and wrote about the implications of using violence to repress rebellion resulting from poverty and injustice in other venues than Brazil.

Liberation theology brought forth the political aspect of the Church's charitable work and was criticized on the grounds that it was encouraging the armed revolutionary struggles that swept Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s.

[8] Câmara published Spiral of Violence in 1971, a short tract written when the United States was immersed in a still escalating Vietnam War.

[18] In his famous interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, he also stated that, despite his support for non-violence, he did not condemn violent tactics: "And I respect a lot priests with rifles on their shoulders; I never said that to use weapons against an oppressor is immoral or anti-Christian.

He believed in the Fátima apparitions but he interpreted its call for the "conversion of Russia" as meaning that the Soviet Union would abandon its anti-religious policies but will not be rejecting communism.