Don’t Read My Next Article—Or Maybe You Will – Folha de S. Paulo, July 21, 1974

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

In São Paulo, where contrasts of all kinds abound, few are as striking as the one between Tiradentes Avenue and the Convento da Luz, with its Sacred Art Museum, located on that avenue. A long wall, perhaps more than half a block long, separates the two worlds. On the outside is the avenue with its tangled, noisy traffic, further complicated by the super-powerful machines used to build the subway. Inside the convent’s walls, the atmosphere is almost the same as it was two hundred years ago. There, tranquility, meditation, prayer, and good taste took root and have flourished for so long that they permanently permeate the atmosphere with a subtle, enveloping spiritual aroma. Without one realizing it, this envelopment begins the moment one crosses the wide gate, on whose railing the date 1870 can be read. One thus enters a garden of unpretentiousness, simplicity, and disconcerting calm. And if one does not visit the beautiful museum, one walks directly to the church. This is accessed through an atrium paved with venerable granite worn down by the footsteps of generations of the faithful. Immediately afterward, a tall gold-and-white Baroque-style door, solid and stern as if it were the very face of Meditation, erases from one’s mind the memory of all the clutter moving and feverishly bustling in the street. You enter the church, and everything smiles. That light, noble, and supremely serious smile is one of the charms of our colonial art. A high dome, graceful proportions, altars and statues full of charm and dignity. One’s attention finally focuses on the presbytery.

From the top of the altarpiece, a statue of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, in the shadows, sends down from its niche successive and uninterrupted effusions of maternal tenderness, kindness, and assurance of help.

A little farther back is a tabernacle with imposing lines, as if it were a Louis XIV palace. On the floor, a marble tombstone marks the final resting place of Friar Antônio de Sant’ana Galvão, the Franciscan founder of the Convent. As a posthumous eulogy, only these simple and supreme words: “animam suam in manibus suis semper tenens, placide obdormivit in Domino die 23 decembris. Anno 1822.” He always kept his soul in his hands and continually governed it! What praise! How much more valuable this is than flying a powerful airplane, running an entire country, or even a bank (I use here the scale of values characteristic of a super-modern mentality). Friar Galvão’s memory has withstood the dust of these 150 years. People of all ages and social classes continually pass by, asking for blessings of all kinds—and are heeded. In 150 years, who will visit the graves of today’s super-powerful and applauded people, to whom many petitions are made but not always answered?

While your eyes are fixed on the Tabernacle, where—as a red lamp resembling a ruby indicates—the King of Kings and Lord of Hosts is truly present, and your mind wanders through such themes, at certain times of the day, a group of female voices, whose purity has not faded with the passing of the years, can be heard reciting psalms, antiphons, and lessons in rectus tonus. Only then do you realize that an immense lattice at the back of the church hides from profane eyes the wives of Christ, whose faces cannot be seen because of their strict cloister. Successive generations of Conceptionist nuns have lived there for more than 150 years, separated from the things of the world and devoted to prayer and atonement so that God may forgive and regenerate the world.

A simple episode—a true fioretti—can illustrate the extent of this detachment from earthly things. Dom Duarte Leopoldo, the great Archbishop of São Paulo, once told me the story of a nun who had entered a cloistered convent in a distant past, when São Paulo still had no railroads. When the first trains appeared, their whistles pierced the quiet air of the city and reached the nuns’ ears. But how could the old nun see them, since the cloister forbade her to look out the windows? Moved by the nun’s observance, Archbishop Duarte gave her permission to stand at the window just once when a train passed by. However, the nun asked to be excused from that privilege. She wanted to die without seeing the train so that, through this mortification, she could suffer even more for the sins of the world. It was not long before “animam suas in manibus suis semper tenens” departed to contemplate heavenly glory, alongside her Founder.

Some may find the narration of this little episode suffocating. If so, I recommend they not read my next article, as they would not understand it. Others, whom it has delighted with a breath of fresh air, may enjoy what I will narrate about the founder of this hive of angels, Mother Helena Maria do Espírito Santo.