“Beyond the highly probable sadness and punishments towards which we advance, we have the sacred lights
of the dawn of the Reign of Mary”
Having begun in a climate of optimistic hope in the future, the twentieth century ends in an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion. The word “chaos”, often used by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira to indicate the anarchic goal of the Revolution, has entered into general use, in the Nineties, by the media and even in the simple conversations of the man on the street, to indicate a total lack of clarity and of points of reference. The euphoria with which the West had welcomed the end of the cold war, the liberation of the East European countries from Communism, the reunification of Germany, was succeeded by an increasingly widespread feeling of anxiety and worry.1
The “crisis” described forty years in advance by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in Revolution and Counter-Revolution seems to have arrived at its final maturation. Never before in its history has mankind seemed so far from the ideal model of Christian civilization as indicated by the Pontifical Magisterium.
The century coming to an end, declared John Paul II at the beginning of his Pontificate, “has so far been one of great calamities for man, of great devastations, not only material ones, but also moral ones, indeed perhaps above all moral ones”.2 In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the Pope confirmed this evaluation of our time: “The twentieth century will have been an era of massive attacks on life, an endless series of wars and a continual taking of innocent life.”3 This judgement reverses the optimistic one that had greeted the dawn of the century, to the rhythm of the Excelsior Ballet. The nineteen hundreds will not be remembered as the triumphant era of Progress, but as the age of mass human sacrifices and of technological barbarism. The globalization of wars, the birth of the concentration camp universe, abortion on a world-wide scale, are different but coinciding expressions of the great holocaust offered in this century to the myth of Modernity.4
The “dream of construction” of a new world is today fading and is being succeeded by the “dream of destruction” that attacks the building of modernity, knocking it down from its foundations.5 With the failure of the pseudo “new order” advocated by totalitarian regimes, the world sinks into a “new world disorder” in which the self-destructive march of the Revolution seems to find its definite conclusion. “Chaos and post-modernity are concepts that are growing ever closer together, up to the point that they tend to melt into one another.”6 The great philosophies of history that were born with the French Revolution — Hegelianism, positivism, Marxism — show that they are incapable of understanding the meaning of the events and forecasting their direction. The crisis of the idea of Progress unmasks the deception of a profane philosophy of history that is opposed to Christian philosophy. The Christian theology of history, which is at the base of the Counter-Revolutionary thinking, re-emerges vigorously in all its up-to-dateness.
Notes:
1. Nowadays, according to Ignacio Ramonet, “one can actually talk of the ‘geo-politics of chaos’ to describe the epoch the world is presently experiencing” (La planète des désordres, in an issue dedicated to the “Géopolitique du chaos”, Manière de Voir 33 – Le Monde Diplomatique, February 1997). Already in 1991 the Corriere della Sera carried an editorial significantly headlined “The world disorder”, its editor Ugo Stille stated: “The year 1990 began under the sign of hope and optimism, 1991 appears as a rather difficult year, full of unknowns and dangers, against a background of turbulence and confusion” (U. Stille, “Il disordine mondiale”, Corriere della Sera, 2 January 1991). Among the new literature on the subject, Pierre Lellouche, Le nouveau monde. De l’ordre de Yalta au désordre des nations, Paris, Grasset, 1992; Gianni Statera, Roberto Gritti, Il nuovo disordine mondiale, Milan, Franco Angeli, 1994; Alberto Cavallari, L’Atlante del disordine. La crisi geopolitica di fine secolo, Milan, Garzanti, 1994. “The most superficial examination of the situation — wrote Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in 1992 — shows that the word ‘chaos’, which until a short time ago was thought to be a scarecrow by people considered sensible, has become a fashionable word”. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Os dedos do caos e os dedos de Deus”, Catolicismo, no. 499, July 1992.
2. John Paul II, Encyclical Redemptor Hominis of 4 March 1979, no. 17.
3. John Paul II, Encyclical Evangelium Vitae of 25 March 1995, no. 17. This judgement reiterates that already pronounced by the Pontiff on 14 August 1993 in Denver, on the occasion of the VIII World Youth Day, AAS, vol. 86, 1994, p. 419.
4. The first to demolish this myth are today its authors Cf. for example the volume of the famous English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, London, Penguin Group, 1994.
5. R. de Mattei, 1900-2000. Due sogni si succedono, p. 11-28. On the new theory of chaos, cf. also James Gleick, Chaos, London, Heineman, 1989.
6. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Os dedos do caos e os dedos de Deus.