In the first part of this series, I talked about how a reading in Pünderich reminded me once more of a family fact that had always been known to us, but never really spoken about: that we are related to a family named Arns in Brazil that accomplished far more there than I could have imagined as a child. This part is about a person from that family who impressed me the most while researching: Zilda Arns, a pediatrician, younger sister of Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, and founder of one of Latin America's largest children's aid organizations.
- Zilda Arns Neumann was born on August 25, 1934, in Forquilhinha, Santa Catarina, to parents Gabriel Arns and Helena Steiner, who had emigrated from Reil.
- As a pediatrician, she founded the Pastoral da Criança in 1982/83, a church-run aid network combating child mortality in Brazil.
- The organization grew to around 262,000 volunteer workers across roughly 20 countries and, according to the Chronik der Gemeinde Reil, supported around 1.8 million children in 2005.
- Zilda Arns died on January 12, 2010, in the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, while she was giving a talk there.
- She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize multiple times and was honored with her own Brazilian postage stamp in 2010.
A Pediatrician from an Emigrant Family
Zilda Arns Neumann was born on August 25, 1934, in Forquilhinha, a small town in Santa Catarina that her father Gabriel Arns had co-founded. Her parents, Gabriel Arns and Helena Steiner, both came from the Mosel region around Reil. This isn't just family lore, it's written in black and white in the Chronik der Gemeinde Reil, Tausend Jahre Reil, published by our local community. Zilda was the younger sister of Paulo Evaristo Arns, who later became known as Archbishop of São Paulo and cardinal (Zilda Arns, Wikipedia).
She studied medicine and specialized in pediatrics, working for years as a practicing physician. At first, nothing about this career suggested it would one day grow into one of Brazil's largest civil-society movements. The impetus, as so often in this family, came through her brother.
The Phone Call That Changed Everything
In the early 1980s, James Grant, then Executive Director of UNICEF, raised an issue at a UN world peace conference in Geneva with Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, an issue that was hitting Brazil especially hard at the time: the high mortality rate among infants and young children, particularly in the country's poorer regions. The cardinal, as the family tells it, and as the Chronik der Gemeinde Reil also recounts, immediately thought of his sister, the pediatrician. He called her. Zilda Arns thought about it briefly and said yes.
That yes became, in 1982/83, the Pastoral da Criança, a church-backed network that fought child mortality and malnutrition using the simplest of means: education about breastfeeding, hygiene, rehydration solutions for diarrheal illness, and regular weight checks for young children, all organized by volunteer helpers right in the communities. Anyone looking today for the organization's official founding story will find, on the Pastoral da Criança website, Dom Geraldo Majella Agnelo formally named as a co-founder on the church side. The family account and the Reil chronicle describe the cardinal's phone call as the decisive impetus for Zilda's involvement. The two versions don't contradict each other, they simply tell different parts of the same founding story, and I don't want to declare either one the single correct account here.
How an Idea Became a Network of Hundreds of Thousands of Volunteers
What happened next is the part that surprised me most while reading. The Pastoral da Criança didn't stay a local project, it grew over the decades into one of Latin America's largest solidarity networks. According to the Chronik der Gemeinde Reil, the organization counted around 262,000 trained volunteer workers and was active in roughly 20 countries. In 2005, according to this source, it supported around 1,817,000 children.
The effect can be seen in a single number that made me pause the first time I read it: in the communities served by the Pastoral da Criança, child mortality dropped, according to the same source, from 56 to 15 per thousand births, comparing the years before and after the program's rollout. That's not an abstract success. Those are children alive today because a neighbor or a volunteer helper stopped by regularly and asked about their weight.
For this work, Zilda Arns was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize multiple times. Exactly how many times is reported differently across sources, so I'm deliberately leaving the precise number open here. In 2023, she was posthumously inducted into Brazil's Book of Heroes and Heroines of the Fatherland.
January 12, 2010
Zilda Arns died on January 12, 2010, in the earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She was there to present a Pastoral da Criança project and was in the middle of giving a talk in a church to a group of religious sisters when the earthquake hit. According to one witness account, she was struck on the head by the collapsing roof (Senádo Notícias). She was 75 years old.
The reaction in Brazil shows what this woman meant to the country. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva personally attended her wake in Curitiba, the seat of her brother's archdiocese. That same year, the Brazilian postal service issued a stamp in her honor, as part of a joint MERCOSUL issue titled "2001–2010 Década da Cultura de Paz, Homenagem a Zilda Arns" (value: R$1.45). This design is also reproduced in the Chronik der Gemeinde Reil, and we happen to have one of these stamps ourselves.
What I Don't Know for Sure About the Visit to the Winery
I already hinted in the first part that I have a very hazy childhood memory of Zilda Arns once visiting us at the winery. That's one of the open questions in this research. I'll be asking my grandparents and parents specifically about when exactly that might have been and what actually happened. If anything concrete comes of it, I'll add it here later. Unfortunately, I also haven't found a photo.
Why This Story Means More to Me Than Family Pride
As I write this series, I notice how differently the two siblings filled their respective roles. The cardinal stood in open resistance to a military dictatorship, publicly, visibly, often at risk to his life. His sister worked more quietly, closer to individual families, but with an impact that can be measured in raw mortality figures. Both grew from the same family that Nikolaus Arns of Reil founded in 1846, the same family we come from too. The next part is about the cardinal himself: his resistance to the dictatorship, the documentation project Brasil: Nunca Mais, and the question of how much courage it took to publicly oppose a regime at that time.
To Close: a Wine for This Story
For a story that is at its core about caring for children, I didn't want to recommend a wine that simply sounds good next to the narrative. So this time my choice falls on our Weißer Traubensaft (white grape juice): pressed from the same grapes that go into our wines, just without fermentation. A drink that can sit on any table where children are present, with no compromise on quality. It's a small, perhaps slightly unexpected connection, but it fits a woman who devoted her life to children's health.
- Pastoral da Criança – the official website of the organization founded by Zilda Arns, with current figures and ways to donate or get involved
- Fundadora da Pastoral da Criança morreu em missão humanitária no Haiti – Senádo Notícias (in Portuguese)
- Zilda Arns – English-language Wikipedia article, for international readers of this series
- MoselbrasilianerInnen – the book by Gert Eisenbürger and Gaby Küppers that partly inspired this series
