In the Constituent Assembly, whose inaugural session is seen above, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira—the youngest and most voted deputy—was assigned a prominent role, especially as a negotiator (on the right, indicated by a circle in the photo).
After the formation of Vargas’ provisional government, the new cardinal of Rio, Sebastião Leme, had begun to promote a movement of lay people in order to give a voice to the Catholics in the organization of the new political regime in Brazil. On 30 May 1931, the image of Our Lady of Aparecida was carried in triumph from her shrine to Rio de Janeiro.24 The next day, a crowd of about one million people accompanied Our Lady to the Esplanada do Castelo, where she was awaited by the head of State, Vargas, and the highest civil and military authorities. The image was placed on the altar and Cardinal Leme officially proclaimed her “Patroness of Brazil”. “The name of God is crystallized in the soul of the Brazilian people”, Cardinal Leme stated. “Either the State ceases to be atheistic and agnostic, and recognizes the God of the people, or the people will not recognize the State.”25
Meanwhile, on 9 July 1932, a “constitutionalist” revolt developed in São Paulo but, without the support of the other regions, it failed after just a few months;26 however, the Paulista rebels forced the government to call elections for the following year to vote for a new Constitutional Assembly.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, who had never actively participated in the revolt, did however understand the importance of the calling of the Constitutional Assembly, which offered an occasion to create, not so much a party, but a Catholic movement “above parties”.27
It was Plain, too, who in October 1932 suggested to the Archbishop of São Paulo, Duarte Leopoldo e Silva, to do something in Brazil similar to what General de Castelnau28 had done in France: create a liasing association among the electors in order to direct their vote to candidates who would undertake to respect the Catholic programme. Archbishop Duarte willingly accepted the proposal and invited the young Marian Congregation member to put it in motion starting with a discussion about it with Cardinal Leme. The following month, “Doctor Plinio”, as he had already come to be known, went to Rio where he spoke about it with two young militants of the Catholic movement, Heitor da Silva Costa and Alceu Amoroso Lima. They, in turn, approached Cardinal Leme with the proposal. The latter thought the idea to be excellent and invited them to draw up the Statutes of the new association. Thus the “Liga Eleitoral Católica” (LEC),29 was born with the aim of orienting the Catholic vote in the elections for the National Constitutional Assembly. It would present the candidates of the various parties with a series of requests, defined as “minimum demands”, in order to commit them to operate as Catholics in Parliament. Pandiá Calógeras was nominated as president of the LEC, with Alceu Amoroso Lima as his secretary-general.
On 13 November the LEC was also officially established in the city of São Paulo. Dr Estevão Emmerich de Souza Rezende was appointed as the local president and Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira as secretary. Cardinal Leme invited the archbishops, bishops and apostolic administrators of the country to rapidly create local councils. Thus every diocese had its council and in the early months of 1933 the LEC was able to draw up its programme and choose its candidates for Parliament. When, at the end of March, the list that included the Catholic Paulista candidates was compiled, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was chosen by Archbishop Duarte as one of the four candidates of the Chapa única (Single ticket) of São Paulo.30
On 3 May 1933 the elections were held all over the country. To the general surprise, the congressman who received most votes in the whole of Brazil was Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, a Marian Congregation member who had only recently finished his university studies.31 It was “A Marian victory”, as the Legionário entitled its editorial:
“The central figure of this beautiful page in the history of the Congregations in São Paulo was Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, the pious son of Mary, the leader of the Catholic Electoral League, the Marian candidate to the Constitutional Assembly.”32
On 15 November 1933 the Third National Constitutional Assembly of Brazil was solemnly installed in the Tiradentes palace of Rio de Janeiro. However, Cardinal Leme’s instructions to the LEC deputies were quite precise. No bloc of clearly identifiable Catholic congressmen was to be formed and nobody in the Assembly should take on a prominent role as a Catholic “leader”. Furthermore no congressman was to openly intervene on the Catholic demands, because too strong of a “face-to-face” confrontation would compromise the aim of the LEC, which was to modify the secularist physiognomy of the Brazilian state. The strategy chosen aimed at obtaining this result by indirect ways, in scattered order. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira followed these instructions, but the greatest defenders of the LEC proposals were the very exponents of the Paulista bloc.33
In the name of the Catholic congressmen of São Paulo, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira asked the Assembly to pay special homage to the figure of Father Anchieta, the four hundredth anniversary of whose birth fell on 19 March 1934.34 On the floor he defended the freedom of teaching and the right to vote of the religious, reflecting on the worthy role of the Society of Jesus in Brazil.35 This was sufficient for him to be attacked during the debate as “sectarian”. “I prize my religious beliefs above any possible affection”, he responded.
This incisive action of the LEC was not without results. The Assembly not only approved the “minimum demands” of the League — indissolubility of the marriage bond (art. 144), the right to give religious instruction in the schools (art. 153), religious assistance to the armed forces and in the prisons (art. 113 no. 6)36 — but also numerous other requests such as: to invoke the name of God in the preamble of the Constitution37; state assistance to large families (art. 138 § d7); the right of religious to vote (art. 108); Sunday rest (art. 121 § 1); authorisation for religious cemeteries (art. 113 § 7); military service of ecclesiastics done in the form of spiritual or hospital assistance (art. 163 § 3); the plurality and freedom of workers’ unions (art. 120); the law against subversive propaganda (art. 113 § 9). The Constitution of 1934 was the high point of the work carried out by the Catholic movement and the success of the LEC remained unique in the history of the country. As the former Brazilian minister, Paulo Brossard, admitted: “In the history of Brazil, no independent political organisation had more electoral influence than the Catholic Electoral League.”38
In 1934 the possibility of establishing private universities was introduced in Brazil. In São Paulo, the Free School of Philosophy, Science and Arts of São Bento already existed. It was founded in 1908 by the Benedictines and important personalities such as Professors Alexandre Correia and Leonard van Hacker taught there. It was now recognized by the government. Likewise the government recognized the female School of Philosophy, Science and Art of Sedes Sapientiae Institute run by the Regular Canonesses of St Augustine. Both Schools, destined to be incorporated into the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, invited Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira to hold the Chair of History.39 Plinio saw this as an excellent chance offered to him by Providence for entering into direct contact with young people. He accepted the post, together with that of Professor of History of Civilization at the University College, attached to the historic Law School. Thus he began his teaching activity which for many years was his main professional occupation, together with that of practising law.
Notes:
24. Gustavo Antonio Solimeo, 1717-1967. “Rainha e Padroeira do Brasil”, Catolicismo, no. 202, October 1967; Hamilton d’Avila, “Três episodios na história da Padroeira nacional”, Catolicismo, no. 418 October 1985, pp. 10-12. Cf. also Júlio Brestoloni C.S.S.R., A Senhora Conceição Aparecida, Aparecida-São Paulo, Editora Santuario, 1984.
25. “Palavra de S. Eminenza”, O Legionário, 89 ,1 November 1931.
26. On the Paulista revolution cf. among others: Hélio Silva, 1932: a guerra paulista, Rio de Janeiro, Civ. Brasileira, 1976; Stanley E. Hilton, A guerra civil brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, Nova Fronteira, 1982.
27. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Liga eleitoral católica”, O Legionário, no. 111, 15 January 1933. “Either Catholicism is able to win in the ballot boxes and make the country progress resolutely towards religious reform, or extreme socialism will take over Brazil to make it a victim of the numerous Calles and Lenins who fill the backrooms of our politics and who are anxious to ‘mexicanize’ and ‘sovieticize’ the Land of the Holy Cross” (ibid).
28. General Edouard de Curières de Castelnau (1851-1944) was one of the commanders of the French army during the First World War, in which he lost three children. Formerly congressman of the Aveyron from 1919 to 1924, starting from 1925 he devoted himself to the Féderation Nationale Catholique, of which he was president until his death, to promote a civic action “in the interest of the Catholic religion, the family, the society and the national patrimony”. He was refused the field marshal’s baton because of his convictions as a fervent Catholic. Cf. the recent study Yves Gras, Castelnau ou l’art de commander, 1851-1944, Paris, Denoël, 1990.
29. Statute (1932) and programme (1933) of the LEC in Oscar de Figuereido Lustosa P., Igreja e Política no Brasil. Do Partido católico a L.E.C. (1874-1945), (São Paulo, Edições Loyola, 1983), pp. 101-26. Cf. also Mónica Kornis, D. Flaksman, Liga Eleitoral Católica, in DHBB, vol. III, p. 1820; Raul Silva, Influência política da Igreja Católica na Assembleía Constituinte de 1933/34. Dissertação de mestrado, Brasília, Universidade de Brasília, 1978.
30. The “Single ticket for a united São Paulo” was a result of the link-up of all the frontline political or social forces of the Paulista life of the day. Of these forces, two were of a typically party nature: the Partido Democrático, that represented above all the urban intelligentsia and some incipient left-wing groups, and the older PRP (Partido Repúblicano Paulista), which was conservative. The currents of social expression were the Associação Comercial, the Federação dos Voluntários, representing the generation that had risen against Vargas, and the Liga Eleitoral Católica.
31. P. Corrêa de Oliveira received 24,714 votes, 9.5 percent of the total. The number of votes was sufficient to elect two congressmen and was double those received by the lawyer Alcântara Machado, his former professor, who came in second. Among the others elected for the Liga Eleitoral Católica were Andrade Furtado for Ceará; Mgr Arruda Câmara and Barreto Campelo, for Pernambuco; Lacerda de Almeida for Paraná; Aldroaldo Mesquita da Costa for Rio Grande do Sul.
32. “Uma vitoria mariana”, O Legionário, no. 120, 7 May 1933.
33. M. Kornis, D. Flaksman, Liga Eleitoral Católica.
34. “If we may have recourse to a profane comparison, in order to give an idea of Anchieta’s importance in our History” he wrote at the time “we would say that he was for Brazil what Lycurgus was for Sparta and Romulus for Rome. In other words, he is one of these fabulous heroes to be found at the origins of some great races who raise the first walls, build the first buildings and organize the first institutions”. Corrêa de Oliveira, “A nota da Semana”, O Seculo, 7 September 1932.
35. O Legionário, no. 145, 13 May 1934.
36. In an article of the magazine A Ordem, entitled “O sentido da nossa vitória”, Alceu Amoroso Lima greeted the 30 May 1934 as “a date of capital importance in the history of Brazilian Catholicism”, stating that after the Masonic Constitution of 1824, the Positivist one of 1891 and the Secularist one of 1926, with the fourth Brazilian constitution “the Catholic programme triumphed entirely” (Tristão de Athayde, “O sentido da nossa vitória”, A Ordem, no. 52, June 1934, pp. 417, 421-2 (pp. 417-23)).
37. The new constitution, that replaced that of 1891 and that of 1926, came into effect on 15 July cf. Themistocles Brandao Cavalcanti, Las constituciones de los Estados Unidos del Brasil, (Madrid, Instituto de estudios politicos, 1958), pp. 379-533. With 168 votes against 37, the congressmen inserted this preamble: “We, the representatives of the Brazilian People, placing our trust in God, gathered in a Constitutional National Assembly to organize a democratic regime that safeguards the unity of the Nation, liberty, justice and social and economic well-being, decree and promulgate the following Constitution…” P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Deus e a Constituição”, O Legionário, no. 74, 8 February 1931.
38. Jornal de Minas, Belo Horizonte, 3 July On the influence of the LEC, and in particular on the article that placed the
State “under the protection of God”, cf. also Thales de Azevedo, A religião civil brasileira. Um instrumento político, (Petropolis, Editora Vozes, 1981), pp. 79-87.
39. In 1946 these two institutions merged into the Catholic University of São Paulo of which Archbishop Vasconcellos Motta was grand chancellor and Paulo de Tarso Campos, bishop of Campinas, was rector. The following year saw its canonical establishment with the granting of the title of “Pontifical” cf. AAS, (1947), vol. 39, pp. 134 sgg.