The pontificate of John XXIII, and then the opening of the Council, seemed to have inaugurated a new climate of a “thawing” among realities already defined by the Magisterium as antithetic .41
On 7 March 1963 John XXIII had received in audience at the Vatican Alexis Adjubei, son-in-law of Kruschev and director of’ Izvestia.42 The encyclical Pacem in terris,43 which had appeared on 11 April 1963, was presented to public opinion as a basis for future collaboration between movements of Christian inspiration and movements of Socialist inspiration. From the French philosopher Roger Garaudy to the inspirer of the Italian “historical compromise” Franco Rodano, many theorists of the convergence between Catholics and Communists were to refer to it.44 The Kremlin had meanwhile made it known that if in the sittings of the Council the Communist problem was debated, the ecclesiastical observers of the Greek-Schismatic Russian Church would withdraw from the assembly. This threat contributed to paralysing the ecclesiastical circles for whom ecumenism was an imperative of that hour.
The attitude of the Communist governments with regard to the Catholic Church and all other religions was evolving from open persecution to a limited tolerance that permitted a restricted freedom of worship and of word. In the first session of the Council, some conservative prelates with whom Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was in contact agreed with him on the fact that it was not lawful for Catholics to have an agreement with the Communist regime, even at the price of the concession of a certain freedom of worship. However they believed that it was not easy to demonstrate the theory. He therefore devoted himself to a new study, that appeared in August 1963 in Catolicismo with the title The Church and the Communist State: the Impossible Coexistence.45 In the work, dedicated to the problem of the lawfulness of the “peaceful coexistence” between the Church and the Communist regime, the author unequivocally demonstrated that Catholics cannot accept any modus vivendi with Communism that involves renouncing the defence of the right to private property, decreed by the seventh and tenth Commandments. The essay, translated into Spanish, French and Italian, was distributed to the 2,200 Council Fathers and 450 journalists from all over the world who were present in Rome, raising an echo that reached beyond the Iron Curtain.46 On 4 January 1964, a complete version of the text appeared in the Roman daily Il Tempo, arousing the attention of the public opinion of the Eternal City. The book had numerous editions world- wide in various languages and was accorded a letter of approval signed by Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities, and by Archbishop Dino Staffa, secretary of the same department, later a cardinal. In this letter it was hoped for “the widest circulation for this compact pamphlet, which is a most faithful echo of all the Documents of the supreme Magisterium of the Church”.
The core of the study is a theory of Pius XII that was dear to Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira:
“The good or evil to souls depends and is infiltrated by the form given to society, whether consistent or not with divine law. That is to say, it depends on whether men, all called to be vivified by the grace of Christ, in the earthly contingencies during the course of life, breathe the healthy and vivid breath of truth and moral virtue, or the deadly and often lethal bacillus of error and depravation.”47
Temporal order can in fact exercise a profound action, forming or deforming, over the soul of the people and of individuals. The Church cannot renounce rectifying this order, not even with the pretext of “spiritual” aims.
“By renouncing the teaching of the precepts of the Decalogue which are at the basis of private property (seventh and tenth commandments), the Church would present a disfigured image of God Himself. Such a condition would be gravely prejudicial to the love of God, the practice of justice and the full development of the faculties of man, and, as a consequence, to his sanctification.”48
The Magisterial mission of the Church has after all as its object a teaching that is an indivisible whole. “The Church, in its teaching function cannot accept a half silence, a half oppression, to obtain a half freedom. It would be a complete betrayal of its mission”.49
During the general congregation of 20 October 1963, the Fathers were presented, at the initiative of a group of French prelates, with a “message for humanity” prepared by the Dominicans Chenu and Congar. The message aroused various criticisms in the hall, among which that of containing no mention of the “Church of Silence”. It was especially criticised by the Ukrainian bishops in exile, who subsequently presented a statement which called the world’s attention to the absence of their Metropolitan Josef Slipyi from the Council, deported to Siberia over seventeen years previously, while the Council Assembly saw the participation of two observers from the Patriarchate of Moscow whom they defined as “meek and useful instruments in the hands of the Soviet government”.50
The distribution of the Freedom of the Church in the Communist State was connected to two other important initiatives: on 3 December 1963, Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer officially delivered to Cardinal Amleto Cicognani, Secretary of State, a petition signed by 213 Council Fathers of 54 different nationalities, in which the Holy Father was asked to provide for the elaboration and study of a schema of conciliar constitution where:
“1. Catholic social doctrine is expounded with great clarity and the errors of Marxism, Socialism and Communism are denounced from a philosophical, sociological and economic point of view.
“2. Those errors and that mentality that prepare the spirit of Catholics to accept Socialism and Communism and that renders them disposed towards them be dispelled.”
Bishop Geraldo de Proença Sigaud, on his part, on 3 February 1964 personally delivered to Paul VI a petition signed by 510 prelates of 78 countries that implored the Pontiff, in union with his bishops, to consecrate the world, and Russia explicitly, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.53 Once again, the contribution of Dr Plinio to the elaboration of the text was decisive. The petitions presented by two Brazilian bishops and the book by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira were, as he pointed out in Catolicismo, an organic whole. “As a whole, the three documents constitute, each one in its own right, three distinctly important episodes in the fight against the greatest enemy of the Holy Father, of the Catholic Church and of Christianity.”54
Notes:
41. On the Ostpolitik, whose premises date to the Twenties (A. Wenger, Rome et Moscou 1900-1950, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1987), Cf. Giancarlo Zizola, Giovanni XXIII. La fede e la politica, (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1988), pp. 55-211; A. Riccardi, Il Vaticano e Mosca, pp. 217-64. In 1976, Father Alessio Ulisse Floridi, member for 15 years, as “Sovietologist”, of the college of writers of La Civiltà Cattolica, published a book on Mosca e il Vaticano (Milan, La Casa di Matriona, 1976) in which he analyzed the Vatican Ostpolitik from an unusual angle: that of Soviet “dissension”, showing how those who should have been the beneficiaries of the policy of détente were actually its victims. Later, in recalling the participation in Vatican Council II of the “observers” of the patriarchate of Moscow, whose bond of direct dependence on the Kremlin was known, he remarked: “It is certain, that on the part of the Kremlin there was a deep interest in preventing any possible attempt of the Council to condemn Communism officially. (…) The Orthodox Church put aside its reservations regarding the Council only after it appeared clear that the Council would not condemn Communism” (On the subject of ‘dissension’ and ‘ostpolitik’, Interview with Father Alessio U. Floridi edited by R. de Mattei, Cristianità, no. 32, December 1977). Cf. also Dennis J. Dunn, Détente and Papal-Communist relation, 1962-1978, Boulder (Colorado), Westview Press, 1979; Mireille Maqua, Rome-Moscou. L’Ostpolitik du Vatican, Louvain-la-Neuve, Cabay, 1984.
42. A few days later, the secretary of the PCI, Togliatti, in full election campaign, officially proposed a collaboration between Catholics and Communists, affirming that “religious utopia” can serve as a revolutionary impulse on the road of Socialism (Cf. “Rinascita”, 30 March 1963). In Italy, in the elections of 29 April 1963, the PCI increased its votes by a million, which came above all from Catholic circles seduced by the “dialogue” between the Holy See and the Soviet regime.
43. Text in AAS, vol. 55, 1963, pp. 257-304.
44. On Roger Garaudy (De l’anathème au dialogue, Paris, Plon, 1955), Cf. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Garaudy esboça nova aproximação” and “A manobra Garaudy”, Folha de S. Paulo, 8 and 15 March 1970; on Franco Rodano, (Questione democristiana e compromesso storico, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1977) Cf. A. Del Noce, Il cattolico comunista, Milan, Rusconi, 1981. Cf. also Gianfranco Morra, Marxismo e religione, Milan, Rusconi, 1976.
45. Cf. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “A liberdade da Igreja no Estado comunista”, Catolicismo, no. 152, May-August 1963; ibid., no. 161, May 1964; then with the title Acordo com o regime comunista: para a Igreja, esperança ou autodemolição?, São Paulo, Editora Vera Cruz, 1974. En. tr. The Church and the Communist State: the Impossible Coexistence, New Rochelle (NY), The Foundation for a Christian Civilization, 1978.
46. The study was violently attacked in Poland by the Catholic-Communist movement Pax in its publications Kierunki (no. 8 of 3 January 1964) and Zycie i Mysl (nos. 1-2 of 1964). The magazine Wiez of Warsaw also aligned with Pax. In France, the famous Catholic newspaper of Paris L’Homme Nouveau (5 March 1964) defended the work which was however attacked by the progressivist publication “Témoignage Chrétien” (no. 1035 of 1964). On the Polish “anomaly”, that is, on that singular historical model of co-existence of the Catholic Church and the Communist State in Poland, Cf. Giovanni Barberini, Stato socialista e Chiesa cattolica in Polonia, Bologna, CSEO, 1983; Norbert A. Zmijewski, The Catholic-marxist ideological dialogue in Poland, 1945-1980, Aldershot (England), Darmouth Publishing Company, 1991.
47. Pius XII, Radiomessage La solennità della Pentecoste of 1 June 1941, in AAS, vol. 33, 1941, p. 197.
48. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, . The Church and the Communist State: the Impossible Coexistence, p. 13. The exactness of this theory was demonstrated by the last dramatic events in Russia and in the former countries of the Warsaw Pact, in which decades of Communist dominion produced so many and significant damages to the faculties of man, from which he still has not managed to free himself.
49. Ibid, p. 39.
50. G. F. Svidercoschi, Storia del Concilio, pp. 164-5. Two days after the publication of this document, on 23 November, Mgr Willebrands, on behalf of the Secretariate of the Union between Christians, during a press conference, defended the Russian observers, who had “demonstrated a sincerely religious and ecumenical spirit”, while regretting the communiqué of the Ukraine bishops. On 9 February of the following year, Cardinal Slipyi was suddenly released from prison and arrived in Rome; the same occurred, during the early months of 1965, for the archbishop of Prague, Josef Beran.
51. R. M. Wiltgen S.V.D., Council News Service, vol. I, p. 79. Cf. the text of this petition, Catolicismo, no. 157, January 1964.
52. Father Wiltgen made it known that “a short time before the delivery of the petitions, a sixteen page article entitled The Church in the Communist State: the Impossible Coexistence, written by Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, a lay Catholic university professor in Brazil, had been distributed to each Council Father. The article supplies the doctrinal proofs to show that to admit that the Church can exist and enjoy its essential freedom in a Communist state is against Catholic principles”. Council News Service, cit., vol. I, p. 79.
53. The text of the historical document, Catolicismo, no. 159, March 1964.
54. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “A margem de três documentos providenciais”, Catolicismo, no. 259, March 1964, p. 3.