Statue of El Cid Campeador (Burgos, Spain)
“I am certain that the principles to which I dedicated my life are as relevant today as ever and that they indicate the path
the world will follow in the coming centuries.
The sceptics will smile, but the smiles of sceptics were never able to hinder the victorious march of those who have Faith.”
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira died aged almost 87 in São Paulo, Brazil, on 3 October 1995, the feast, according to the old calendar, of a saint who was particularly dear to him: St Thérèse of Lisieux.
“The life of the Church and the spiritual life of each faithful Catholic” wrote Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, referring to St Thérèse “is a ceaseless struggle. Sometimes God gives souls admirable moments of interior or exterior consolation, and sometimes He gives His Church days of splendid, visible and palpable grandeur. However, the true glory of the Church and of the faithful comes from suffering and from fighting. It is an arid fight, with neither palpable beauty nor defined poetry. In this fight, one sometimes advances in the night of anonymity, in the mud of indifference or incomprehension, under the storms and the bombardment unleashed by the conjugated forces of the world, the flesh and the devil. But this fight fills the angels of heaven with admiration and attracts the blessings of God.”1
This corresponds to what St Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort asks of Our Lady in the page that concludes The Secret of Mary:
“As for my portion here on earth, I wish only to have a share in yours, that is, to have simple faith without seeing or tasting, to suffer joyfully without the consolations of men, to die daily to myself without flinching, to work gallantly for you even until death without any self-interest, as the most worthless of your slaves.”2
The spiritual life of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was not the main object of this study, which desired, above all, to bring into focus the public aspect of his thinking and his work. It is however clear that it is only in the depths of his inner life that we can understand the mystery of a limitless love for Christian civilization and an implacable hatred of the Revolution which was attacking it. Of this love and of this hatred he made the axis around which his ideals and activities revolved,3 in this way offering himself as a paradigm and as a stone of contradiction of his time.
His life, wrote Cardinal Bernardino Echeverría Ruiz, “has moved us to reflect that the more intense the evils of an epoch, the more exceptional are the figures Divine Providence calls to face them. It is a reflection on His design to fight crises, calling souls of fire”.4
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was a crusader of the twentieth century: he squarely faced the destructive march of the anti-Christian Revolution, fighting each time, and often contemporaneously, the National Socialist pseudo-mysticism, the hedonistic American way of life, the Socialist and Communist egalitarian utopia, Catholic progressivism that tried to demolish the Church from within.
“Christian combativity” he wrote “can only mean legitimate defence. There is no other way for combativity to be legitimate. A Christian is always moved to fight out of love for something that has been offended. The greater the love with which one fights, the more vigorous the fight will be. This is why a Catholic’s greatest combativity is in defence of Holy Mother Church when she has been outraged, denied and trodden under foot.”5
During his struggles and difficulties, next to the virtue of strength, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira exercised above all that of hope, convinced as he was, as he wrote to his mother in 1930, that: “from him to whom God gives Faith, He demands Hope”.6 The supreme synthesis of these two Christian virtues is confidence, which St Thomas profoundly defines “spes roborata”, “a hope strengthened by a sound conviction”.7
The difference between hope and confidence, comments Father Thomas de Saint-Laurent in his turn, is not in the nature, but only in the degree and intensity. “The faint glimmer of the dawn and the dazzling light of the sun at its zenith form part of the same day. So hope and confidence pertain to the same virtue; one is the complete blossoming of the other”.8
His confidence in the final victory of the Catholic Counter-Revolution and in the coming of the Reign of the Immaculate Heart of Mary was the virtue that Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira inspired most deeply into his numerous disciples spread throughout the world, even outside the ranks of the TFP. He nourished this confidence, not only at the spring of Fatima, but with a Marian devotion that was especially dear to him: that of Our Lady of Good Counsel of Genazzano, from whom in 1967, on the occasion of a serious illness and of a distressing spiritual trial, he had received a great interior grace: the supernatural certainty that he would not have died before fulfilling the mission entrusted to him by Divine Providence.9 He fulfilled this mission and fully realized his vocation.
At the end of this study, as an historian and as a Catholic, I feel that I can affirm with tranquil certainty that the words of St Paul so often applied to the great defenders of the faith suit few men in the history of the Church as well as they do Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira:
“Bonum certamen certavi”, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith”.10
The procession that, with the great standards of the TFP raised high, on 5 October 1995 accompanied Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira with purposeful solemnity to his final resting place, wound its way through a São Paulo that was very different from that in which he had been born. Perhaps no city in the world underwent, during this period, the urban and architectural devastation of São Paulo and none, in this radical transformation, better reflects the nihilistic itinerary of the twentieth century, from the Belle Époque to the turbulent chaos that precedes the turning point of the millennium.
During an age when, like in his native city, everything was dizzily changed, overwhelming values and institutions, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira remained steadfast in the principles he believed in. He was consistently faithful to that ideal of Christian civilization in which he had seen not only the past, but also the irreversible future of history if men should respond to the divine Grace.
Headquarters of the National Council of the TFP, then located at Rua Pará No. 25 (Higienópolis, in the capital of São Paulo): Prof. Plinio kisses the standards that will be carried in the campaign to distribute the special issue of Catolicismo (April-May 1969) denouncing communist infiltration in the Holy Church.
“I am certain” he wrote “that the principles to which I consecrated my life are as relevant today as ever and that they indicate the path the world will follow in the coming centuries. The sceptics will smile, but the smiles of sceptics were never able to hinder the victorious march of those with Faith.”11
In this simple and absolute consistency lies all the heroism and greatness of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. His spiritual testimony which we quote in conclusion of our work explains, better than any other words, the secret of this greatness.
“In the name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and of the Blessed Virgin Mary, my Mother and Lady, I, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, declare: that I have lived and hope to die in the Holy, Roman Catholic and Apostolic Faith, which I hold with all the strength of my soul.
“I cannot find sufficient words to thank Our Lady for the privilege of having lived since my very first days and of dying, as I hope, in the Holy Church. To it I have always devoted, currently devote, and hope to devote until my last breath absolutely all my love. All the persons, institutions, and doctrines I have loved in the course of my life and currently love, I have loved and love solely because they were or are in accord with the Holy Church, and in the measure to which they were or are in accord with the Holy Church. Likewise, I never opposed institutions, persons, or doctrines except insofar as they were opposed to the Holy Catholic Church.
“In the same manner, I thank Our Lady — without being able to find adequate words
— for the grace of having read and disseminated the Treatise on the true devotion to the Blessed Virgin, by St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, and of having consecrated myself to Her as Her perpetual slave. Our Lady was always the Light of my life and from Her clemency I hope she will continue to be my Light and my Help until the last moment of my existence.
“Again I thank Our Lady — and with what emotion — for having granted me to be born of Dona Lucilia. I revered and loved her to the utmost of my capacity and, after her death, not a single day passed without my remembering her with unspeakable longings. Of her soul I also ask that she assist me until my last moment with her ineffable goodness. I hope to meet her in Heaven amidst the luminous cohort of souls who most specially loved Our Lady.
“I am fully conscious of having fulfilled my duty by having founded and directed my glorious and dear TFP. In spirit, I kiss its standards. The spiritual link that unites me to each member of the Brazilian TFP, as well as to those of the other TFPs, is such that it is impossible to mention any one in particular to express to him my affection.
“After death, I hope to be near Her, praying for all of them, thus helping them more efficaciously than in this earthly life. I forgive with my whole soul those who have given me cause for complaint. I express my wishes that my death may be a reason for great graces for everyone. I have no instructions to give for the eventuality of my death; Our Lady will provide better than I. In any event, from the depth of my soul and on my knees, I beseech each and every one to be completely devoted to Our Lady all the days of their lives.”
Notes:
1. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “A verdadeira gloria só nasce da dor”, Catolicismo, no. 78 (June 1957).
2. St Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, The Secret of Mary, no. 69.
3. Cf. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution p. 81.
4. Cardinal Bernardino Echeverría Ruiz, F.M., “Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira: distinguished apostle, ardent and intrepid polemist”, Crusade, January-February 1996.
5. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Passio Christi, conforta me”, O Legionário, no. 637, 22 October 1944.
6. J. S. Clá Dias, Dona Lucilia, vol. I, p. 107.
7. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-IIae, q. 129, art. 6 ad 3.
8. Raymond de Thomas de Saint Laurent, The Book of Confidence, 3rd edn., (Pleasantville (NY), The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property 1989), pp. 19-20. This inspired work was particularly loved and spread by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira.
9. Cf. the statement of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira himself, published in the bulletin Madre del Buon Consiglio (July-August 1985) and quoted as a document in J. S. Clá Dias, The Mother of Good Counsel of Genazzano. With a foreword by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, (Sunbury (PA), Western Hemisphere Cultural Society 1992), pp. 225-6.
10. 2 Tim. 4:7.
11. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Philosophical self-portrait.