In a letter of 27 October 1935 addressed to Cardinal Leme and the Brazilian bishops, Pius XI hoped for the establishment of Catholic Action in Brazil as well.36 The Ação Católica Brasileira was founded that same year with the apostolic aim “to spread and to foster the Catholic principles in the life of the individual, family life and social life”.37 Its function was to co-ordinate all the Catholic associations and works already in existence in the country, subordinating them to the same guidelines. According to its statutes, it should be placed under the immediate dependence of the ecclesiastic hierarchy, carrying out its activity outside any party organization. On 4 April 1937 Catholic Action was solemnly installed in the Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro and Alceu Amoroso Lima, better known under the pseudonym of Tristão de Athayde,38 was nominated the first national president while the effective direction was entrusted to an Episcopal commission composed of five members. It was based on the Italian model, and it preferred dioceses as relatively autonomous nuclei within the organizations and grouped the members according to age and sex.39
At that time in Brazil there was already a powerful organized Catholic movement which had the Marian Congregations as its main support and, within them, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira as their natural leader. The creation of Catholic Action was not without its problems, as inevitably certain organizational areas overlapped. Beyond the intentions of the Pontiff, there was a tendency to absorb all the pre-existing organizational realities into the new structure. The problems did not arise only from organizational contrasts but from the risk that movements with ancient traditions and undisputed roots, such as the Marian Congregations, might lose their specific identity or have it diminished. Furthermore, in Brazil, as in many other countries where it was established, Catholic Action appeared more permeable to new progressivist influences.
While Catholic Action was being founded, the Marian Congregations achieved their full development in Brazil. On the eve of 1938 there were one thousand Marian Congregation groups with 150,000 members of which over 25,000 were in São Paulo.40 Father Irineu Cursino de Moura proclaimed “the present-day crusade of the army of Mary for the restoration of the religious relics of our glorious past” indicating as leaders and as
“present-day apostles, of the land of the Holy Cross (…) the Tristão de Athaydes, the congressmen Mário Ramos and Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, and so many others, who, like lions, have fought so that our constitution finally be promulgated in the name of God Almighty”.41
Tristão de Athayde and Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira appeared as the undisputed Catholic leaders of Brazil in the middle of the 1930s.42 The former, in Rio, president of the newly- born Catholic Action; the latter, in São Paulo, soul of the Marian Congregations. The lives and apostolate of these two men were, however, destined to go along different paths, until becoming journeys in opposite directions.
Amoroso Lima was responsible for the transfer of the Brazilian Catholic Action to openly Maritainian positions.43 A former disciple of Bergson, at the Sorbonne, then a convert to Catholicism, Athayde followed an evolution that was typical of the intellectuals of his time, from pro-Traditionalism to the Progressivism of Maritain and Teilhard de Chardin whose work reconciled him “with the evolutionism that was in the spontaneity of his thought”.44 If, as has been observed, it is true Bishop Vital embodied the denial of eclecticism and of the spirit of indetermination”,45 the eclectic itinerary of Amoroso Lima represented in Brazil the antithesis of the Catholic consistency of Bishop Vital,46 of which Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira appeared as the legitimate heir.
While Rio de Janeiro represented the Progressivist pole of the religious life of the country, personified by Amoroso Lima, in São Paulo the Traditional pole developed; its “lay leadership” was, as Father da Silva recalls, “in the hands of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira”.47 The ideology of the Paulista leader, as Father da Silva observes, was well summarized in this phrase: “Do we want a Brazil that is truly Brazilian? Then let us make one that is entirely Catholic. Do we want to kill the very soul of Brazil? Then let us tear out its Faith”.48
Notes:
36. Cf. A Ordem XVI (January 1936) pp. 5-11.
37. Monica Kornis, Dora Flaksman, Ação católica Brasileira (ACB), in DHBB, I, p. 11.
38. Alceu Amoroso Lima, known under the literary pseudonym of Tristão de Athayde, was born in Rio de Janeiro on 11 December 1893 and died in Petrópolis on 14 August 1983. In his intellectual formation a profound role was played by the Evolutionism of Silvio Romero, the Idealism of Benedetto Croce and the Vitalism of Henri Bergson, whose lessons he attended in 1913 in Paris. In 1928 he converted to Catholicism under the influence of the Catholic leader Jackson de Figuereido and on the death of the latter he succeeded him as director of the Centro Dom Vital and of the magazine A Ordem. He thus began a new phase of his life during which he collaborated closely with Cardinal Leme, becoming secretary general of the Liga Eleitoral Católica (1932) and first president of the Ação Católica Brasileira (1935-45). However, under Maritain’s influence, he began a revision of his philosophical and political principles that led him to return to the liberal concepts he had before his conversion. In this ideological dimension he promoted the organization of the Partido Democrata Cristão (PDC) whose manifesto he prepared, participating in 1949 in the so-called “Montevideo Movement”, whose aim was to organize the Christian Democrats throughout Latin America. He greeted Vatican Council II enthusiastically, giving due consideration to the influence of the new tendencies of Catholic Progressivism. For an analysis of the confused and contradictory intellectual itinerary of Amoroso Lima Cf. Cunha Alvarenga (José de Azeredo Santos), “História das variações do sr. Tristão de Athayde”, Catolicismo, no. 43, July 1954.
39. Necessary requisites defined by the Statutes for militants in C.A. were “to lead an exemplary life,” “to frequent the sacraments” and adhere to “programmes of the ACB and one’s respective organizaton”.
40. P. A. Maia S.J., História das congregações marianas, p. 61.
41. Ibid, p. 93.
42. During this period, like Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in São Paulo, “Athayde is called the great leader of Brazilian Catholic thought, the co-ordinator of the spiritual forces of the Nation. He is acclaimed as a man whose quiet, prudent and fruitful activity has resulted in the splendid victory for the Catholic claims of the LEC at the National Constituent Assembly” (S. Maria Ancilla O’Neill, M.A., Tristão de Athayde and the catholic social movement in Brazil, (Washington, The Catholic University of America Press, 1939), p. 118). Plinio’s personal acquaintance with Alceu Amoroso Lima dates to 1930, as Amoroso Lima himself recalled in the “Legionário”. Tristão de Athayde, “Bello exemplo”, O Legionário”, no. 97, 8 May 1932.
43. Cf. José Perdomo Garcia, “El Maritenismo en Hispanoamérica”, Estudios Americanos (Siviglia), no. 11 (1951), pp. 567-92. A. Amoroso Lima, “Maritain et l’Amérique Latine”, Revue Thomiste, vol. 48 (1948), pp. 12-17; Eduardo Serafin de Oliveira, “A influência de Maritain no Pensamento de Alceu Amoroso Lima”, A Ordem, no. 78, (1983). “It is mostly through Amoroso Lima—Villaça notes—that Maritain has been exercising a profound and decisive influence in the cultural renewal of Brazilian Catholicism” (O pensamento católico no Brasil, p. 15).
44. Marieta de Morais Ferreira, Leda Soares, Lima, Alceu Amoroso, in DHBB, vol. III, p. 1831.
45. A. C. Villaça, O pensamento católico no Brasil, p. 10.
46. Amoroso Lima then tried to present the founder of the Centro Dom Vital, Jackson de Figuereido, whom he had succeeded, as an unwitting “revolutionary”. “For the younger generations, if we call Jackson a revolutionary, we will be closer to the truth than if we call him a reactionary, which is something he was very proud of” (Tristão de Athayde, “Foi a 25 anos”, Diário de Belo Horizonte, 29 November-1 December 1953). In reality, Jackson, as José de Azeredo Santos observes in Catolicismo, was “an irksome burden for those who cast down the flag along the way and exchanged Dom Vital and Veuillot for the unfortunate Dom La Cerda and Maritain” (Cunha Alvarenga (José de Azeredo Santos), “Jackson, um fardo incômodo”, Catolicismo, no. 37, January 1954, p. 4). Antonio Carlos Villaça who defines Amoroso Lima as “profoundly liberal” notes that “if Jackson deeply marked Alceu’s soul, he did not change the liberal tendency which remained intact” (O pensamento católico no Brasil, p. 13).
47. J. A. da Silva, O.F.M., O Movimento litúrgico no Brasil, p. 28.
48. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “O Concilio”, O Legiónario, 2 July 1939, p. 2; J. A. da Silva, O.F.M., O Movimento litúrgico no Brasil, p. 28.