The simple dynamism of passions and human errors, states Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, is insufficient to explain the victorious march of the Revolution. This success demands the drive and direction of shrewd and conscious agents who direct a revolutionary process that is in itself chaotic: these are above all the anti-Christian sects, of any kind.
All the sects and secret forces whose aim is the destruction of the Church and Christian civilization can be considered as Agents of the Revolution. The mother sect, around which the others are organized, is Freemasonry.59 It, as is seen clearly from the Pontifical documents, and especially from the encyclical Humanum Genus by Leo XIII, has as its “ultimate purpose, the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere Naturalism”.60
From 1931, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira began to deal with the problem of the occult action of Freemasonry and the secret forces.61 The Brazilian thinker referred often to the “secret forces” that operate in history, but precisely because of the importance which he attributed to the problem, he did not want to belong to the band of fanciful researchers that are so frequent in this delicate sector of research. He always faced this matter with seriousness and equilibrium, following a school that includes such great authors as Father Augustin Barruel,62 Jacques Crétinau-Joly,63 Father Nicolas Deschamps64 and, during our century, after Mgr Delassus, Mgr Ernest Jouin65 and Count Léon de Poncins.66 These authors, and others, documented in an incontestable manner the existence of an insidious anti-Christian conspiracy in history.
“The production of a process as consistent and continuous as that of the Revolution amid the thousand vicissitudes of centuries fraught with surprises of every kind seems impossible to us without the action of successive generations of extraordinarily intelligent and powerful conspirators. To think that the Revolution could have reached its present state in the absence of such conspirators is like believing that hundreds of letters thrown out a window could arrange themselves on the ground to spell out a literary piece, Carducci’s Ode to Satan, for instance” .67
Actually, the real problem for Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira is not so much to reveal the identity of the conspirators but, much more important, to show the profound nature of the Revolution and the mechanisms thanks to which it advances: in fact the agents can change, but the revolutionary process, its mechanisms and its anti-Christian goal do not change.
If the classic denunciation of the secret forces is focused on their channels of infiltration and of control of the social body, especially as regards the political and financial nerve-centres of modern States, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s work, as Fernando Gonzalo Elizondo rightly observes, introduces a new dimension:
“It is the study and denunciation of the masonic techniques of governing the souls. The profound explanation of the knowledge and manipulation of the disorderly tendencies, of the creation of ambiences, of the spreading, whether by the media or by other means, of a mentality that, becoming generalized, guarantees the successful advance of revolutionary ideas and facts”.68
Notes:
59. The first condemnation of Freemasonry dates to the constitution In eminenti of Clement XII of 24 April 1738. The excommunication was confirmed and renewed by Benedict XIV with the constitution Providas of 18 May 1751 and by Pius VII with the constitution Ecclesiam a Jesu Christo of 13 September 1821. Leo XII ratified and sealed the previous decrees with the apostolic constitution Quo graviora of 13 March 1825; Pius VIII spoke in the same sense with the encyclical Traditi of 21 May 1829, as did Gregory XVI with the encyclical Mirari Vos of 15 August 1832, and Pius IX with the encyclical Qui pluribus of 9 November 1846 and numerous other interventions. The last great papal document regarding the Freemasons is the encyclical Humanum Genus by Leo XIII of 20 April 1884 (in AAS, 1906, vol. XVI, pp. 417-33). Since then Popes included the condemnation in canons 684, 2335 e 2336 of the Code of Canon Law in force from 1917 to 1983. In the New Code of Canon Law that came into force on 29 November 1983, Freemasonry is not expressly mentioned as it was in the previous Code. The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a document of 26 November 1983, did however confirm that “the negative judgement of the Church with regard to Masonic associations remains unchanged, because their principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore enrolling in them remains forbidden. The faithful who belong to Masonic associations are in a state of sin and cannot receive Holy Communion” (L’Osservatore Romano, 27 November 1983).
60. Leo XIII, Encyclical Humanum genus.
61. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “A Igreja e o Judaismo”, A Ordem, no. 11, January 1931, pp. 44-52.
62. Augustin Barruel S.J. (1741-1820), Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, 4 vols., London, Fauche, 1797-8. In the same year, the Mémoirs of Barruel were translated from the French by the Hon Robert Clifford, with the title, Memoirs illustrating the history of Jacobinism, 4 vols., London 1797-8.
63. Jacques Crétinau-Joly (1803-75), historian of the Vendée and of the Society of Jesus, using documentary material
received from the Holy See, outlined in L’Eglise Romaine en face de la Révolution, (2 vols., Paris, Plon, 1859), the situation of the struggles between the Catholic Church and the Revolution in the period that goes from the Pontificate of Pius VI to the beginning of that of Pius IX. The work was reprinted by the Cercle de la Renaissance Française (2 vols., Paris, 1976).
64. Nicolas Deschamps J. (1797-1872), Les Sociétés Secrètes et la Société ou philosophie de l’histoire contemporaine, 2 vols., Avignon, Fr. Séguin aîné, 1854, then Paris, Oudin, 1882, enriched by a third volume of documents and by an Introduction sur l’action des sociétés secrètes au XIX siècle by Claude Jannet.
65. Ernest Jouin (1884-1932) parish priest of the Church of St Augustin in Paris, in 1912 launched the “Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes”, the famous RISS, (published until 1939) which, due to the seriousness of the documentation and the expertise of its collaborators, was an study tool of great value. Joseph Sauvêtre, Un bon serviteur de l’Eglise, mgr. Jouin (1844-1932), Paris, Casterman, 1936.
66. Léon de Poncins (1897-1975), Les forces secrètes de la Révolution, Paris, Bossard, 1928; with Emmanuel Malynski, La guerre occulte, Paris, Beauchesne, 1936; La Franc-maçonnerie d’après ses documents secrets, Chiré-en-Montreuil, Diffusion de la Pensée Française, 1972; Christianisme et franc-maçonnerie, Chiré-en-Montreuil, Diffusion de la Pensée Française, 1975. In English: Freemasonry and the Vatican: a struggle for recognition, London, Britain Publishing, 1968.
67. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, p. 38. An entire section of the work Despreocupados rumo à Guilhotina is dedicated to Freemasonry and secret societies, pp. 265-317.
68. Fernando Gonzalo Elizondo, “El deber cristiano de la militancía contrarrevolucionaria”, Verbo, nos. 317-18, September- October 1993, p. 840, pp. 825-40.