The Unknown Billionaires by Michael Caldwell

Author:Michael Caldwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Edir Macedo

Edir Macedo

Birth date: February 18, 1945

Net worth: $1.3 billion

Residence: Brazil and USA

Religion is big business, and Brazil’s Edir Macedo is one of God’s biggest businessmen.

Although he was raised a Catholic, Macedo converted to evangelical Christianity in 1970. Since then, he has expanded into an impressive array of business ventures: secular, religious, legal, and not-so-legal. There are almost as many charges against him – in multiple countries – as there are pages in the Bible.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1945, Macedo was considered something of an “ugly duckling” in his family. His father had moved from the country’s rural northeast down to Rio de Janeiro at a time when there was a great deal of this sort of internal urban migration taking place within Brazil. Macedo was one of seven children. Several of his fingers were deformed – abnormally long and rather gnarled. He was a short, skinny boy, and his father was often physically abusive to him. Although the family wasn’t poor, they were far from wealthy; their home lacked a refrigerator and a television.

Macedo dropped out of school at the age of eleven and went to work in his father’s bar. At the age of sixteen, he found a job at the Rio de Janeiro State Lottery. He also lost his virginity to a prostitute in a brothel. Thereafter, his relationships, such as they were, were encounters he has described as “spicy, heated, and full of lasciviousness.” Feeling that something was missing in his life, he tried to immerse himself in his family’s practice of Umbanda, a syncretic religion comprising Catholicism and legacy spiritual practices brought to Brazil by African slaves.

At eighteen, Macedo began attending Pentecostal services given by a Canadian preacher. At that time, Pentecostal churches were opening up all over Brazil. This was one of the first signs that Catholicism was beginning to lose its hold on the country. He felt an immediate affinity for the religion and converted, baptizing himself not once but three times (for good measure?). According to his memoir Nothing to Lose, he danced, sang, and spoke in tongues during services. “I would leave the service walking in the clouds,” he wrote. “The feeling is indescribable. Peace, security, confidence, cheer – as if a light turned on inside of me, illuminating my whole body.” Macedo wanted to share this feeling with others, and later, when his second daughter was born with a cleft lip and palate, he decided he wanted to devote himself to his religion completely.

Macedo founded his first church, which he named the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, in Rio de Janeiro in 1977. He used rented space in an old funeral parlor, but this didn’t seem to detract from his appeal. He quickly came to be known as the “bossa nova pastor” because of his animated gestures and his big hair (he is now balding). As for his gospel, it was a hybrid like the Umbanda he had grown up with, comprising Catholic-style rituals, Pentecostal faith healing and miracle cures, and elements of Afro-Brazilian spirituality.

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