by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Today, I offer readers a few more documents to help them maintain their resistance to Pope Paul VI’s détente with communist regimes.
I quote here an excerpt from an illustrious archbishop whose past was closely tied to the highest government of the universal Church. Discussing the opposition to communism by Catholics behind the Iron Curtain, he said:
“If the [communist] oppressors encounter in the organized presence of the Catholic Church an insurmountable obstacle to the absolute affirmation of their ideas, it is not because the Church is an enemy of man and society, harmful to true progress and the common good, but because the oppressors are.”
“This drama seems so illogical and so great that some other mysterious cause must be at work: the ‘power of darkness’….
“It is up to us to recall this tragedy, which unfolds in such a terrible way. The people of our time barely grasp a glimpse of it, reluctant to participate in its passion, to speak too openly in favor of the victims, or to let public opinion dwell on its memory, which can still give strength and vigor.”
How true, how impressive, and how relevant these words are.
However, they date back to 1959. Their author is Most Rev. Giovanni Battista Montini, then Archbishop of Milan (“The Glory of Martyrdom,” address at the Church of the Holy Apostles and St. Nazario, Milan, June 29).
What change must have occurred behind the Iron Curtain for Paul VI’s line on communist regimes to differ so markedly from that of Archbishop Montini?
We do not know. No one does. It is a mystery…
* * *
I have already had occasion to refer to His Excellency Bishop Boza Masvidal, the valiant Cuban prelate, expelled from his homeland at gunpoint and now residing in Venezuela, in this column.
He has now given an important interview to Catolicismo, the prestigious monthly cultural magazine published in Campos under the auspices of the illustrious Diocesan Bishop, D. Antônio de Castro Mayer.
In this highly topical interview, Bishop Boza Masvidal offers a striking account of the martyrdom the Church is enduring in his poor homeland.
At one point, the Catolicismo representative asked how he viewed the policy of conciliation with the Cuban communist regime pursued by Monsignor Cesare Zacchi, who had recently been promoted by Pope Paul VI from Chargé d’Affaires to Nuncio.
The Cuban prelate replied: “I do not share the attitude of Monsignor Cesare Zacchi, Chargé d’Affaires of the Nunciature in Havana, because it amounts to a defense of and a compromise with the regime. Today, when the Church everywhere seeks a free hand to fulfill its mission without human constraints, this compromise with a regime that violates all rights and oppresses the human person is inexplicable.”
Although His Excellency’s words referred exclusively to the Apostolic Nuncio’s attitude, it is impossible not to see that the concepts therein relate to the Vatican itself, whose directives Monsignor Zacchi is—by the nature of his position—an executor of.
Cardinal Štěpán Trochta (1905-1974)