SÃO PAULO – Brazil’s Catholic Church has been putting pressure on Congress to avoid the approval of a bill legalizing casinos, bingos, and other forms of gambling historically forbidden in the South American country.

The concern of the clergy and many lay Catholics is especially strong now because Brazilians have already been feeling the terrible impacts of the recent legalization of on-line sports bets.

Authorized in 2018 and regulated last year, the on-line sports bets suddenly became a giant social phenomenon, with millions of Brazilians gambling on a regular basis.

Research conducted by psychiatrists of the University of São Paulo estimated at 2 million the number of Brazilians addicted to gambling. The Central Bank demonstrated $8.5 billion were spent in 2023 in on-line bets. The Locomotiva Institute revealed that 86 percent of the people who gamble are in debt.

“That problem is already felt in the Church. We frequently talk to people addicted to gambling or with relatives of addicts,” Bishop Devair Araújo da Fonseca of Piracicaba in São Paulo state told Crux.

Reports of people who lost their houses, their cars, and their jobs due to their addiction to sports bets became more and more common in Brazil over the past few months. The Central Bank informed that 5 million Brazilians who are part of a governmental program called Bolsa Família – which pays relief money to people in need – made on-line bets in August, totaling $500 million.

In November, the Supreme Court ordered the federal government to create mechanisms to impede the use of Bolsa Família funds in gambling, but the Executive argued that it’s almost impossible to completely ban the recipients from the sports bets.

The bill aiming to legalize casinos and other forms of gambling in Brazil was originally introduced in 1991, but it only passed the Chamber of Deputies in 2022.

After that, it was approved by a Senate commission and was scheduled to be voted on Dec. 4. But a requirement presented by Catholic Senator Flavio Arns was approved. Now, the bill must have some of its aspects analyzed by the Ministry of Health before going back to Congress.

“I think we’ll manage to prevent that bill from being approved. The losses caused by bets have been very relevant and everybody knows them,” Congresswoman Simone Marquetto, a member of the Catholic bloc in the Chamber of Deputies, told Crux.

She said that the Catholic bloc is still too small – it congregates only eight or nine regular participants, Marquetto said – and thus it’s not able to make decisive decisions in the Congress, like the Evangelical bloc does.

“But Evangelicals and Catholics converge in many themes. That’s the case with gambling,” she added.

Both groups also repudiated the legalization of on-line bets, but Marquetto thinks it’s difficult to change the situation now.

She said that the bloc has been close to the Bishops’ Conference and local prelates in Brasilia, so the group’s guidance comes from the Church itself.

The Bishops’ Conference’s battle against gambling is not new. A document from 1981 shows that then-secretary-general Ivo Lorscheider talked about the need to avoid legalizing gambling with authorities of the Ministry of Justice.

Ten years later, when Congress was discussing the potential reopening of casinos, Bishop Antônio de Miranda of Taubaté published an article with huge criticism of the idea.

In 2022, when the bill was reintroduced, the episcopate warned that casinos could be a way criminal groups conduct money laundering. In a statement, the bishops also affirmed that gambling brings irrecuperable damage to morals, to society, and the economy.

“Chance games are not a sin in themselves, but when gambling appears, everything changes. Gambling generates addiction and insecurity, limiting a person’s ability to make decisions,” da Fonseca claimed.

Advocates of the bill have been saying that allowing casinos and bingos will be something positive for the tourism industry, generating up to 2 million jobs. People like da Fonseca disagree.

“If the government invests in tourism and not in gambling, the result will be the same,” the bishop said.

He compared the limits established by the government to cigarettes, which cannot be freely advertised, with the TV ads of on-line sports bets, for instance – something that will be common if casinos reappear.

“Influential actors incentivizing people to gamble is something very problematic. It’s not a form of entertainment, it’s the beginning of chaos,” da Fonseca said.