Above, inauguration of the Legionário machines, attended by the Archbishop of São Paulo, Dom Duarte Leopoldo e Silva. To the right of the Archbishop are Mrs. Lucilia Ribeiro Corrêa de Oliveira and Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. To his left are the Bishop of Sorocaba, José Carlos de Aguirre, the Auxiliary Bishop of São Paulo, José Gaspar de Affonseca e Silva, and Mrs. Olga de Paiva Meira, President of the Catholic Women’s League.
The Legionário, the official voice of the Marian Congregation of the Parish of St Cecília, directed by Mgr Marcondes Pedrosa, was a monthly paper of four pages when it began publication on 29 May 1927.
The topics the paper dealt with were the defence of traditional and family principles, the safeguarding of the rights of the Church, the formation of new Catholic elites, and the struggle against Communist infiltration. The first article by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, regarding the Catholic University, appeared in no. 43 of 22 September 1929; the second, published in November 1929 under the title “The Vatican and the Kremlin”,40 already gives an idea of what will be one of the fundamental themes of his thought: the impossibility of any agreement between the Catholic Church and Communism. In an article entitled “Our Political Demands”, in the issue of 8 February 1931, he rallied the Catholics to demand from the new government the defence of the “rights of the Church”.
With his concise style, his polemical strength and his love for the truth, the young Marian Congregation member, who had as his examples great Catholic journalists such as Louis Veuillot41 and, in Brazil, Carlos de Laet,42 demonstrated that he corresponded perfectly to the journalistic model indicated by Pius XI in the encyclical Rerum omnium of 26 January 1933. In it the Pontiff had declared St Francis of Sales as Patron Saint of “all those Catholics who, with the publication of newspapers and of other writings, illustrate, promote and defend Christian doctrine”.43 Addressing Catholic journalists, the Supreme Pontiff added:
“First of all they must study with the utmost diligence and should strive, as much as possible, to know Catholic doctrine; they must beware of failing to tell the truth or, under the pretence of avoiding offence to their adversaries, of diminishing or disguising it.”44
On 6 August 1933, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was called to assume the direction of the Legionário which, in that same month, became the unofficial organ of the Archdiocese of São Paulo. The publication was not destined to the general public, but to the circles of the Catholic movement in order to guide their thoughts and their actions. It was within these circles, from the North to the South of the country, that the powerful influence of the weekly soon extended.
To those who accused him of not being very “charitable” towards his enemies, Plinio replied that the attitude of the Legionário was one of combat yes, but a defensive combat and not an offensive one. “The main goal of Legionário is to orient the opinion of those who are already Catholic.”45
Plinio was the author of the editorials and of the regular feature “À margem dos factos”, subsequently called “7 dias em Revista” (7 days in review). He gathered around him a team of able collaborators46 among whom were two young priests destined to become leading figures in the Brazilian clergy: Father Antonio de Castro Mayer,47 ecclesiastic assistant to the journal, and the Divine Word priest, Father Geraldo de Proença Sigaud.48 Among the most brilliant lay collaborators, José de Azeredo Santos stood out. He was a young Mineiro Marian Congregation member who had come from Rio to São Paulo to practise engineering.49 The team, composed of between five and eight members, met regularly to examine, in the light of the doctrine of the Church, articles from newspapers and pieces of news from all over the world. Dr Plinio was to recall: “From the editorial staff of this weekly was gradually formed a group of friends, all members of the Marian congregation like myself. We dedicated ourselves body and soul to Catholic journalism.”50 In 1936 under the direction of the dynamic editor, the newspaper changed from being a fortnightly of two pages to a weekly of eight pages and from a simple parish newsletter it became the most heeded Catholic voice of the country.
The subjects dealt with during 1936 were of the most varied kind. Religious persecution in Germany, the Revolution in Spain, the socialist “poussée” in France, the dynastic crisis in
England, the presidential elections in the United States, the failure of the League of Nations, the intensifying of Communist propaganda in the world were objects of always profound and clarifying analyses and comments inspired by the doctrine of the Church. “To detoxify readers from the fruits of the neutral press and give them truly Catholic civic news was our constant aim.”51
In January 1937 the Legionário moved from the parish room of St Cecilia towards the centre of the city; it had become the most influential Catholic weekly of Brazil, with a circulation of over 17,000 copies.
Notes:
40. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “O Vaticano e o Krêmlin”, O Legionário, no. 46, 10 November 1929. Cf. also “A Igreja e o problema religioso na Russia”, O Legionário, no. 54, 16 March 1930.
41. On Louis Veuillot (1813-83), courageous director of the daily “L’Univers” le Oeuvres Complètes, 40 vols., Paris, Lethielleux, 1924-40, Cf. also Eugène e François Veuillot, Veuillot, 4 vols., Paris, Lethielleux, 1902-13. “He understood — wrote St Pius X to François Veuillot — that the power of society is to be found in the full and complete recognition of the sovereignty of Our Lord Jesus Christ and in the unqualified acceptance of the doctrinal supremacy of the Church” (Letter C’est avec, of 22 October 1913, in IP, vol. VI, La pace interna delle nazioni (1959), p. 299).
42. Carlos Maximiano Pimenta de Laet (1847-1927) was a brilliant journalist, professor in the famous Pedro II Secondary School of the Academia Brasileira de Letras. He received the title of count from St Pius X for the services he rendered to the Catholic cause.
43. AAS, (1923), vol. 5, p. 49.
44. Ibid.
45. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Offensiva?”, O Legionário, no. 181, 29 April 1935. “And if we were permitted to choose a motto for this fight, we would formulate it thus: towards Catholics, charity and unity; towards non-Catholics, charity to obtain unity” (ibid).
46. Besides Dr. Plinio, the editing staff of the Legionário included: Fernando Furquim de Almeida, José Carlos Castilho de Andrade, José de Azeredo Santos, Adolpho Lindenberg, José Fernando de Camargo, José Gonzaga de Arruda and Paulo Barros de Ulhôa Cintra. Tradition, Family, Property: Half a Century of Epic Anticommunism, pp. 384-5.
47. Antonio de Castro Mayer was born in Campinas, in the state of São Paulo, on 20 June He graduated in theology at the Gregorian University of Rome (1924-7) where he was ordained to the priesthood on 30 October 1927. Assistant General of Catholic Action of São Paulo (1940), then vicar-general of the Archdiocese (1942-3), on 23 May 1948 he was consecrated bishop and nominated coadjutor, with the right to succession, of the bishop of Campos. He governed the diocese of Campos as bishop until 1981. Bishop de Castro Mayer publicly broke with Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira and with the TFP in December 1982. The fact soon became public (Folha da Tarde, 10 April 1984; Jornal do Brasil, 20 August 1984) and is to be linked to the progressive leanings of the former bishop of Campos towards the position of Archbishop Marcel Lefèbvre. A climax was reached with Bishop de Castro Mayer’s participation in the Episcopal consecrations in Ecône on 30 June 1988, which led him to incur an excommunication latae sententiae. He died in Campos on 25 April 1991.
48. Geraldo de Proença Sigaud was born in Belo Horizonte on 26 September A member of the Divine Word Congregation, he studied theology in Rome (1928-32) where he was ordained to the priesthood on 12 March 1932. On 1 May 1947 he was consecrated diocesan bishop of Jacarezinho (1947-61); he was then Metropolitan archbishop of Diamantina (1961-80). Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s association with Archbishop Sigaud lasted thirty years and had begun in 1935, on the occasion of a spiritual retreat in the Seminary of the Holy Spirit. “This friendship — wrote Dr Plinio in 1946 — lasted for over ten years during which the two of us found ourselves in every possible situation: of pain and jubilation, of hope and of passing discouragement, of uncertainty and decisiveness. Together we received applause, together we received censures; our hearts beat in unison, in face of every current event; we went through everything that could unite and separate men” (P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Padre Sigaud”, O Legionário, no. 711, 24 March 1946). Their separation, probably dating from the mid 1960s, was officially announced by the same archbishop of Diamantina on 2 October 1970 when, coming out from an audience with the president of the Republic, Emílio Garrastazu Medici, he stated that the TFP had distanced itself from him because of his support for the land reform promoted by the government and for the liturgical reform of Paul VI. The TFP replied immediately with a long press release in which it stressed the contrast between the consistency of its own positions as opposed to the inconsistency of Archbishop Sigaud’s, confirming “the total uprightness of its attitudes before civil and ecclesiastical law” (“Archbishop Geraldo Sigaud e a TFP”, Catolicismo, no. 239, November 1970). Cf. also P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Dentro e fora do Brasil …”, Folha de S. Paulo, 11 October 1970.
49. “A profound, lively and brilliant journalist, he was, in the full sense of the word, a And as such, his name is written in our annals with letters of gold (…). If the History of Brazil is one day written with entire impartiality, his name will rank among the most distinguished.” (P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “O ‘premio demasiadamente grande’ “, Folha de S. Paulo, 17 July 1973). Thus began a long friendship and co-operation that lasted almost forty years, until the day when Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, kneeling at the foot of the bed of his dying friend, in the Samaritan Hospital of São Paulo, recited in his name the Consecration of St Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort. José de Azeredo Santos is responsible, in Legionário and then in Catolicismo, for discerning articles on Maritainism, on the politics of “outstretched hand”, on modern art, and on Gnosis.
50. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Kamikaze”, Folha de S. Paulo, 15 February 1969.