Perhaps the biggest falsehood about Helder Camara is the one that presents him as a friend of the poor and defender of freedom. The title, defender of freedom fits very badly on one who sang the praises of some of the bloodiest dictatorships that constellated the 20th century; first Nazism, and then Communism in all of its variants: Soviet, Cuban, Chinese… Most of all, however, the title friend of the poor does not fit at all one who sustained regimes that have caused such terrifying poverty, described by the then Cardinal Ratzinger as “the shame of our times.”