Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, author of the famous work ‘The Soul of the Apostolate’
In February 1919, at ten years of age, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira began his studies in the São Luiz School of the Society of Jesus, where the traditional ruling class of São Paulo was educated.97 Between his maternal education and the school’s, there was, as there should be, continuity and development. In the teaching of the Jesuits, he again found the love for method, already instilled in him by his German governess Mathilde Heldmann,98 and above all that militant conception of spiritual life to which his soul so deeply aspired.99
The school was for him his first clash with the world and his first battlefield. There the young Plinio found the “two cities” of St Augustine mixed like the grain and darnel, the wheat and straw, of which the Gospel speaks100 and he realized how the life of man on earth is a hard struggle, in which “the only one to be crowned will be he who has fought”.101 “Vita militia est.”102 That the spiritual life of the Christian is a battle is one of the concepts that is most insistently confirmed by the New Testament, especially in St. Paul’s Epistles. “Christians are born for combat”103 affirms Leo XIII. “The whole essence of a Christian life is to reject the corruption of the world and to oppose constantly any indulgence in it.”104
From St Ignatius, Plinio learnt that “every man’s soul is a field of battle, upon which good and evil fight.”105 As a result of original sin, we all have disordered tendencies that drive us to sin; the devil tries to encourage them and divine grace helps us to conquer them, transforming them into occasions for sanctification. “Man’s free will is the decisive factor of the forces that lead him to the good or to the evil.”106 Plinio appears to us as one of the Paulista children of his generation, whom Father Burnichon, in his visit to the School of São Luiz in 1910, describes as
“serious, grave, reflective. Their faces rarely shine, a smile seems to be unfamiliar to them; on the other hand, they assure me, they are able to stay still for five whole hours listening to academic speeches; this happens from time to time. In short, because of the climate, the race does mature early and this has its advantages and disadvantages, but on the other hand, has a natural calm that does not exclude vivid impressions and violent explosions.”107
In São Luiz, the young Plinio sensed the radical contrast between his family life and that of his companions at school who were already imbued with malice and immorality. As so often happens in schools, the young people who assert themselves over the others were the most worldly-wise: purity was despised and ridiculed, vulgarity and obscenity were considered signs of distinction and success. He reacted with all his strength to this situation. He realized that what was happening was not by chance, but the result of a mentality that was the opposite to that of his family. If he were to accept this mentality, this would have led him to lose, together with his purity, the ideals that sprung from his heart. He understood that the foundation of everything he loved was his religion, and he chose to fight to the death in defence of that conception of life in which he had been formed. A conviction was thus born in him that, over the years, found ever increasing rational foundations:
“It was a counter-revolutionary conception of religion as a persecuted force that teaches us the eternal truths, that saves our soul, that leads us to Heaven, and marks our life with a style that is the only style that makes life worth living. Hence, the idea that, when I reached manhood, I must undertake a fight to overthrow this order of things that I held to be revolutionary and bad, in order to establish a Catholic order of things.”108
Plinio precociously finished his secondary studies in 1925, at the age of 17. Later, when recalling the interior anxiety and isolation of those years, he would pause on that acute crisis of adolescence that was one of the most important phenomena of the history of mankind in the nineteenth century and one of the causes of its deep incoherence.
“The attitude of the nineteenth century in face of Religion and Morality was an essentially contradictory one. (…) Religion and Morality were not considered necessary and obligatory for every human being, throughout one’s whole life. On the contrary, for each sex, every age, each social class, there was a religious situation and moral conduct opposed to that which the nineteenth century prescribed for a different sex, age and social class. The nineteenth century admired the ‘faith of the stoker’ for its simplicity and purity, but ridiculed the faith of the scientist as being biased. It accepted the faith for infants, but condemned it in the youth and in adult men. At most, it tolerated it in old age. It demanded purity of the woman and demanded impurity of men. It demanded discipline for the manual worker, but applauded the revolutionary spirit of the philosopher.”109
On this occasion, addressing his colleagues from a younger generation, Plinio made a vibrant call to the fight and to heroism.
“For us life is not a party, but a fight. Our destinies should be that of heroes and not sybarites. This truth was the subject of meditation a thousand times over and that I repeat to you today (…).
Place Christ in the centre of your life. Let all your ideals converge upon Him. In face of the great fight, the most noble vocation of your generation, repeat the famous phrase of the Saviour: ‘Domine, non recuso laborem’.”110
In 1926, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, following the family tradition, enrolled in the Law School of the University of São Paulo. A young man of contemplative spirit and a great reader, he continued to cultivate his philosophical, moral and spiritual culture next to that of law. Among the works that deeply affected his formation during these years were the Treatise on Natural Law by Father Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio111 and The Soul of the Apostolate112 by Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard. The latter work, that remained one of his favourite books, was a precious antidote to the “heresy of action”113 that was beginning to characterize the era and to which Dom Chautard contrasts the interior life defined by him as
“the state of activity of a soul which reacts against its natural inclinations in order to regulate them, and which endeavours to acquire the habit of judging and acting in everything according to the light of the Gospel and the example of Our Lord”.114
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira loved and profoundly lived this spirit from the years of his adolescence. Even while dedicating himself at a very young age to public action and apostolate, he never forgot to develop his interior life through an assiduous and constant exercise of the faculties of the soul.
Against the confused backdrop of the Twenties that witnessed the birth and spread of Communism and Fascism and the establishment of an American way of life that was antithetical to the traditional way, the ideal of the restoration of Christian civilisation, indicated by St Pius X, seemed distant. In the heart of the young Brazilian student, however, the awareness of a vocation had been formed during all those years.115 It was linked in a mysterious and providential way to the unfulfilled mission of the great Pope who, from his first encyclical E supremi Apostolatus of 4 October 1903, had chosen the motto Instaurare omnia in Christo (Eph.1:10) as the programme of his Pontificate and as the goal for the newly begun twentieth century.
With St. Pius X, Plinio wanted to restore in Christ “not only what properly pertains to the divine mission of the Church, namely, leading souls to God, but also what (…) flows from that divine mission, namely, Christian civilisation in each and every one of the elements composing it”.116
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira himself would one day define his vocation with these words:
“When still very young I marvelled at the ruins of Christendom, gave them my heart, turned my back on all I could expect, and made of that past full of blessings, my Future….”117
Notes:
97. The São Luiz School was founded in 1867 in Itú and transferred to São Paulo to an imposing building at 2324 of Avenida Paulista. Rector of the School then was Father João Baptista du Dréneuf (1872-1948) cf. A. Grève S.J., “Fundação do Colégio São Luiz. Seu centénario”, 1867-1967, in A.S.I.A., no. 26, 1967, pp. 41-59. Among his professors the young Plinio had Father Castro e Costa, who followed his battle in defence of Catholic Action and whom he met again in Rome in the 1950s (cf. J. S. Clá Dias, Dona Lucilia, vol. II, p. 259).
98. Mathilde Heldmann was a native of Regensburg, and had been governess in some European aristocratic “One of the greatest favours mother did for us was to hire the Fräulein” Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was later to recall. (J. S. Clá Dias, Dona Lucilia, vol. I, p. 203).
99. On the “militant” conception of Christian spirituality, Pierre Bourguignon, Francis Wenner, Combat spirituel, in DSp, vol. II,1 (1937), coll. 1135-42; Umile Bonzi da Genova, Combattimento spirituale, in EC, vol. IV (1950), coll. 37-40; Johann Auer, Militia Christi, in DSp, vol. X (1980), coll. 1210-33.
100. Matt. 13:24-7.
101. 2 Tim. 11:5.
102. Job 7:1.
103. LEO XIII, Encyclical Sapientiae Christianae of 10 January 1890, in IP, vol. III, La pace interna delle nazioni, (1959), p. 192.
104. LEO XIII, Encyclical Exeunte iam anno of 25 December 1888, in IP, Le fonti della vita spirituale, vol. II, pp. 345, 358 (pp. 337- 59).
105. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Lutar varonilmente e lutar até o fim”, Catolicismo, no. 67, July 1956, p. 2.
106. Idem.
107. Joseph Burnichon, Le Brésil d’aujourd’hui, (Paris, Perrin, 1910), p. 242.
108. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Memórias, unpublished.
109. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Speech on the closing of the year 1936 to the Archdiocesan College of São Paulo, Echos, no. 29, 1937, 88-92.
110. Idem.
111. On the Jesuit Father Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793-1862) author of the famous Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale, Rome, La Civiltà Cattolica, 1949, 2 vols. (1840-43), in which the relations between law, morals and politics are carefully analyzed in the light of Catholic doctrine, cf. Robert Jacquin, Taparelli, Lethielleux, Paris 1943 and the entry of Pietro Pirri, J., in EC, vol. XI (1953), coll. 1741-5.
112. Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate, Burns & Oates, London “It is not possible to read these admirable pages, whose unction sometimes reminds one of the ‘Imitation of Christ,’ without feeling the treasures of charm his great soul embodied” (P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Almas delicadas sem fraqueza e fortes sem brutalidade”, Catolicismo, no. 52, April 1955). Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard was born in Briançon on 12 March 1858. He was a Cistercian religious of strict observance. In 1897, he was elected abbot of the Trappist monastery of Chambaraud (Grenoble) and in 1899 of that of Sept-Fons (Moulins). During his long government he was forced to look after temporal problems regarding his order which he had to defend against the anti-religious policies of his time. The perfect model of that union of contemplative and active life laid down in the The Soul of the Apostolate, he managed to assert his authority, through his personality, over the minister Clemenceau, convincing him to mitigate his position against the contemplative orders. He died in Sept-Fons on 29 September 1935.
113. The “heresy of action”, understood as a vision of the activist and naturalist world that denies the decisive role of grace in the life of man, had been one of the characteristics of the “Catholic Americanism” at the end of the 1800s, and that had been condemned by LEO XIII in the Letter Testem Benevolentiae of 22 January 1899 in Acta Leonis XIII, vol. XI, Rome, 1900, pp. 5-20. Cf. Emanuele Chiettini, Americanismo, in EC, vol. I (1950), coll. 1054-6; G. Pierrefeu, Américanisme, in DSp, vol. I (1937), coll. 475-88; H. Delassus, L’américanisme et la conjuration antichétienne, Lille, Desclée de Brouwer, 1899; Thomas McAvoy, The Americanist Heresy in Roman Catholicism 1895-1900, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame (Indiana) 1963; Robert Cross, The emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1967; Ornella Confessore, L’americanismo cattolico in Italia, Rome, Studium, 1984.
114. J.-B. Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate, p. 8.
115. “Illos quos Deus ad aliquid eligit, ita praeparat et disponit ut id ad quod eliguntur, inveniantur idonei” [God so prepares and endows those, whom He chooses for some particular office, that they are rendered capable of fulfilling it] (St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, 27, 4c). The vocation is the special form in which God wants his elect to develop. Elect, that is, chosen and, therefore, prepared and willing to be up to the purpose to which God had destined them from eternity.
116. St Pius X, Encyclical Il fermo proposito of 11 June 1905, in IP, vol. IV, Il laicato, 1958, p. 216.
117. These words of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira appear, written in his hand, as the epigraph of the book Tradition, Family, Property: Half a Century of Epic Anticommunism.