Between the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies, the international left launched an offensive of great importance in Latin America. It intended using the progressivist clergy and Catholic circles for undermining the still rather conservative political regimes. However it found its way blocked by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira and the TFP.
When, in July 1968, there came to light a disturbing document by the Belgian priest Joseph Comblin,56 professor in the Theological Institute of Recife, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira decided the moment had come to act openly against Communist infiltration now widespread among the clergy. He addressed a letter to Archbishop Câmara, archbishop of Recife, where he denounced in the Comblin document
“the call to subversion in the country, to revolution in the Church, (…) the calumny against the Civil Authority, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the Armed Forces and the Judiciary, and the presentation of a grossly falsified idea of the national reality”.57
“Of all the campaigns organized by the Tradition, Family and Property movement” according to abbé Antoine “the most spectacular was undoubtedly that of July 1968.”58 In two months, between July and August, the TFP activists collected over one and a half million signatures against Communist infiltration in the Church in the streets of 158 cities of Brazil. Among the signatures were those of 19 archbishops and bishops, numerous ministers, and of dozens of congressmen and politicians. Abbé René Laurentin, who was travelling through Brazil, recalls:
“Highly mobile teams collected signatures just about everywhere: in the railway stations, the airports, and in other public places. The authors of this initiative quite kindly canvassed me in a supermarket in Curitiba. They were holding a standard of red velvet with an upright lion. They invited me to sign ‘against Communism’.”59
The petition was officially presented to the Vatican on 7 November 1969. No reply ever arrived from the Holy See, but progressivism in Brazil suffered a momentary check and Father Comblin was forced to abandon the country.
In January 1969, on the occasion of a conference held for the students of Harvard, Archbishop Câmara proposed the admission of Communist China to the UN and the integration of Cuba into the Latin-American system. The response from the TFP was immediate:
“In a significant article that appeared in the daily newspaper O Estado de São Paulo” recalls Sebastião A. Ferrarini in his book La presse et l’archevêque rouge “the president of the national council of the TFP (…) expresses his entire disagreement with the disturbing proposals of the prelate who, to his way of thinking, follows Marx’s example by making a typical inversion of values by giving primacy to the economy.”60
It was after this analysis by Professor Corrêa de Oliveira that Archbishop Câmara was labelled in Brazil, and then throughout the world, as the ‘red archbishop’.61
After 70 days of campaign, 40 caravans of followers had visited 514 cities and distributed 165 thousand copies of Catolicismo.
Notes:
56. Joseph Comblin was born in 1923 in Brussels and, after having completed his studies in Louvain and Malines where he was ordained to the priesthood in 1947, he was transferred, in 1958, to Latin America where he taught Theology and Pastoral activity in numerous institutes and universities. Among his most famous works, in which man is defined as a “revolutionary animal”, cf. Théologie de la Révolution, Paris, Editions Universitaires, 1970.
57. Catolicismo, no. 211, July 1968.
58. C. Antoine, L’Eglise et le Pouvoir au Brésil, p. 144. “The direct occasion for the explosion of the operations is the publication of a reserved study made by the Belgian theologian Father Joseph Comblin, at the request of Archbishop Câmara. (…) Officially launched on 10 July, the campaign finally ended on the following 12 September. During this period the TFP activists collected 1,600,000 signatures in the streets of 158 towns of the country” (ibid, pp. 144-5). According to Marcio Moreira Alves: “The greatest campaign that they (the TFP activists) undertook, against Archbishop Helder Camara and his friends, obtained, according to the organizers, 1,600,368 signatures, among which were those of 19 archbishops and bishops, of numerous ministers, of dozens of congressmen and politicians” (A Igreja e a política no Brasil, p. 230). “Brazil has become the centre of activity of reactionary circles of the Latin-American Church” the ultra-progressivist Alvaro Delgado notes alarmed. Le clergé en révolte, p. 72.
59. René Laurentin, L’Amérique latine à l’heure de l’enfantement, (Paris, Seuil, 1970), p. 132.
60. Sebastião Antonio Ferrarini, A Imprensa e o Arcebispo vermelho (1964-1984), (São Paulo, Edições Paulinas, 1992), p. 63. In an interview granted to Oriana Fallaci in August 1970, Câmara declared he was “in agreement with the analysis of the capitalist society” made by Marx, hoping for “a society that is remade from scratch on Socialist foundations and without shedding blood”. O. Fallaci, Intervista con la storia, 4th edn., (Milan, Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1980), pp. 577, 583.
61. Among the bishops who on that occasion kept their distance from the TFP, the Brazilian public was amazed to see Bishop Vicente Scherer and the cardinal of Salvador, Eugenio Sales. Catolicismo, no. 212/214, August-October 1968.