Saint of the Day, February 19, 1983
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
“A Roman and Apostolic Catholic, the author of this text submits himself with filial devotion to the traditional teaching of Holy Church. However, if by an oversight anything is found in it at variance with that teaching, he immediately and categorically rejects it.”
The words “Revolution” and “Counter-Revolution” are employed here in the sense given to them by Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in his book Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the first edition of which was published in the monthly Catolicismo, Nº 100, April 1959.
If I were to count how many ships I’ve seen leaving in the same direction as me, in search of the identical suns we want to see rise—the suns of the Reign of Mary! How many people have I seen who set off with enthusiasm and dedication, suddenly started to change, then moved slowly, rowed with less and less strength, and let themselves fall by the wayside! I see them disappear from afar, swallowed up by the first whirlwind, or pull into the first filthy port where they sell firewater and prostitutes. It makes me want to cry!
How many unfulfilled promises! How many of Providence’s plans had flourished and, under various circumstances, sometimes admirably, still had a chance to flourish but ultimately withered away, came to nothing, and sank into life’s swamps and shame precisely because of something similar to what you have just described?
But how is that so? How do such things happen? How do we avoid this terrible evil that doesn’t seem to offend any of God’s Commandments, but turns directly against the first and most essential: Love God above all things?
The crisis of the one who “sabugates” [becomes lukewarm] was very well described. He sets off full of enthusiasm; at a certain point, something happens in his soul, and he begins to worry about trifles. After a while, he’s all trifles. If there were a history of men who don’t deserve to have a history, the history of sailing would be full of those who went astray and got lost on the high seas because they became mediocre. When the seas became dangerous, they were graves of mediocrity.
You sometimes think of heroes’ graves when you pass by the ocean. True, heroes are buried at its bottom. But above all, how many mediocre, scoundrels, and insignificant people! Only sailing for fun, at one point they were swallowed up by a storm, tsunami, or revolution among their ship’s crew they didn’t know how to quell; a naval battle lost to mediocrity; a straight cannon shot wiped the face of the earth clean of those vermin unworthy of polluting it so they come up from the bottom of the sea on Judgment Day across horrified waves flowing back to void being soiled by them as the earth ejects them with horror to give an account before God. How many are there!
How does this happen? How could this happen in our navigation?
The three ships of Columbus, Santa Maria, Pinta, and Niña, left the port of Barcelona, the richest, busiest, and most important port on the Mediterranean, for a great adventure. At a certain point, it was only natural that the sailors began to miss what they left behind.
Mind you, saying natural doesn’t mean it’s right. Many things are natural in man. In Cain’s nature, degraded by original sin, it was natural to envy Abel. It was natural, driven by envy, that he sought to kill Abel. Because of this, it was natural that God’s Justice would go after him.
“Natural” doesn’t necessarily mean legitimate. Natural often means the opposite of legitimate, not under the good nature of things, but under the bad nature of things.
When a man begins great navigations, he may not be physically present at the port of Barcelona. However, each of us was born in a small, individual ‘Barcelona’ with comforts and delights, all the more delicious because they are imaginary and don’t exist in reality. Man clings more to nonexistent imaginations, which he lies to himself that exist, than to what exists in reality.
How many of us have been picked up in our respective Barcelonas by an invisible angel passing by? We see the silvery-golden glint of angel wings and are enchanted: “What’s that? Let’s go in that direction.”
If someone said: “Stay here, because here there’s a future,” we’d laugh them off: “A future?! Never mind. I want that light!”
However, just as man has good potential coming from nature and grace, which is accentuated by a thousand circumstances and leads him to fly on the wings of passing angels, he also has dormant bad tendencies. When the angel wings pass by, those tendencies do not protest but remain quiet, thinking, “I’ll strike later.”
Angel wings are capricious; they pass by, and we follow them. Eventually, it gets dark, and they take their time to return. You’d think they forgot you. We must fight for them; in the meantime, we sometimes have the impression that they have left us.
In those hours of tiredness and abandonment, when everything seems complicated or trivial, we miss ‘Barcelona,’ who speaks in our ears: “Don’t you remember your little Barcelona? Don’t you remember your little bed? Don’t you remember such a thing, and this and that little treat? Don’t you remember you had a future?”
The person feels changed and says, “True, what a great future I had! I also remember that sweet cake, compliments received, and my low-level but delicious slacking off. Angel wings, don’t come back because I will run away!”
The man deserts the long journey he had set out on. It’s terrible, but that’s how it is! Either he defects or does a veiled desertion.
There are two types or modalities in today’s strikes. One is the strike in which you stop working. The other is the so-called “turtle operation” in which you keep working but do everything slowly, leisurely, and more or less… The factory doesn’t stop, but its services are mediocre, the work is negligible, and the overall operation is sluggish.
What’s going on? The “turtle strike”…
Sometimes, the inner longing for ‘Barcelona’ doesn’t lead us to apostatize because angel wings still pass by every now and then. But we neither let go of our longing nor abandon the path of angel wings; we do the “turtle operation” by walking slowly, acting lazily, doing the job poorly, giving and expecting little. The result is that we keep going downhill.
At a certain point, when the person comes to his senses, the fleet is far away, lost in that part of the sea bathed in moonlight. He is left behind where fog reigns, the sea is full of dangerous reefs, and he is still caught up in the longing for ‘Barcelona.’ He says to himself, “You must move very slowly; otherwise, how will you manage?”
He loses touch, and at a certain point, he realizes: “I’m already so far away from Europe that there’s no point in going back. I’m so far from America that I can’t go forward. I’ll row slowly and ask how to get there when they pass. I will be among mediocre people who arrive late, dragging their feet. I will not be a deserter but a second-rate mediocre; that’s what I’m going to be.”
How often do you see things like this? But what is the most profound mystery within it? What is its most special secret?
One thing is to be called to discover America. And although this calling was very high and noble, I don’t hesitate to say that it’s quite another to be called to defeat the Revolution and establish the Reign of Mary!
Imagine if someone who fills this room and is part of the 15 TFPs were not called to discover a continent on this Earth, but to wave his hand and make it look like the most beautiful continent ever. At a considerable height from the Earth, beautiful like Paradise, ordered and holy like a shrine or cathedral, solid like a fortress, attractive like a piece of heaven. All you had to do was make this gesture in a moment of piety and courage, knowing that by making this gesture you could even expose your life, but do it!
Imagine someone standing in front of a communist execution squad and the communists saying, “We will kill you!” And a ray of light said to him: “Ask Our Lady and you will be taken to a place that will be incorporated into the Earth and become the Reign of Mary.” So he would tell the communists: “I fear neither your gunfire nor fury: O Mary, take me and I will return!” And he brings along a new continent.
Didn’t the one who brought to Earth a new continent and a garden that will be Mary’s garden do much more than the one who discovered America?
I referred in particular to that hand gesture. What did I mean by gesture? I understood it as an attitude of the soul. And what do I mean by an attitude of the soul?
Here is what I mean: Angel wings pass by when someone else’s “thau”[1] shines before us, and we feel the glow of our own “thau” when considering his “thau.” As we realize that we are all moving in that direction under that glow, our desire for trivial things passes, and we only want high things leading to God. We don’t just want any high thing leading to God, but a single thing: a great victory for God and Our Lady, crushing a great adversary, and building a great City in the broad sense used by St. Augustine in his famous treatise on The City of God – De civitate Dei. In other words, we want the State, a civilization, an order of things, a situation not just in a little town with boundaries drawn on a map, but a “civitas,” meaning a State or order of things.
That’s what we are driven to desire with all our hearts.
We want the grand victory of what, in his Exorcism, Leo XIII so aptly calls the exaltation of Holy Mother Church. “Exaltation,” in Latin, means to set high. He wants the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church to be placed atop everything, and, consequently, that the mountain’s slopes bend respectfully to the summit and are beautiful, orderly, and consistent with the shrine placed on top.
What is this thing on which the Church is placed? It’s the temporal order. The Church is the spiritual order. By its nature, the spiritual order must hover above the temporal order.
What is the temporal order? It’s the State, countries, and everyone’s everyday life.
This temporal order must flow from the Church; it must come out of her, and be like a sumptuous and marvelous mantle of hers. We want this temporal order for the Catholic Church.
That’s our vocation; that’s what we’re called to do, what our souls are meant to do, and something in our minds tells us: this is what we must want!
I was still thinking about it and felt it when I arrived this afternoon for the “Jasna Gora” formation before our meeting. What is this thing that we feel? It is such a delicate feeling that I would hesitate to say it if this weren’t an evening of confidences: It is that, along with this enormous desire to conquer and win, comes an inner certainty equivalent to a promise made more to our eyes than to our ears: it will come!
A prophetic hope within the soul of each of us gives us this certainty: You may sacrifice your whole life here, but your eyes will not close until you have seen the Promised Land! It will matter to you whether it takes more or less time and struggle, but it won’t matter if you keep this promise in mind: You will arrive!
It is a suave, bright, and strong corollary of this attraction, with angel wings that never lie. When they fly by and suggest that you must go in one direction, which you may find very difficult, the angel is waiting there!
What do I mean by angel wings? Of course, it’s neither a vision nor a revelation, but the moment you realize this is true, it brings a promise of triumph. Come what may, victory is there!
“My Lord and my God, my Lady, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I offer myself entirely to you for whatever you want. I don’t know what it is, but I will do whatever you want, however terrible it may be” (the person thinks of terrible things that might happen and sees if he is ready to respond to grace).
Our Lady remembers all the graces she asked for each of us. She remembers when she asked for a thau to be given to us and was heeded. She remembers her joy in prophetically seeing the thau lighting up our souls.
Poets never tire of praising the beauty of dawns. Our Lady, who gives due importance to spiritual things, is undoubtedly much more delighted to see the dawn of a thau in a soul than any sun anywhere in the world. Is it not true that she is sad as she sees it fading away and desires for that soul to return? Isn’t it true that she wants a lecture like this to call those souls who perhaps aren’t walking in an entirely straight line on the path of their vocation? That is precisely why she wants it, sends graces and light, and supports the words she wants to be said. She gives grace for those words to be spoken and heard. She wants those words to have an effect and be repeated and remembered. Finally, she wants these words to help those who have begun to forget the treasure in their hands and miss ‘Barcelona’ to return to the right path.
So what must we do? We must kneel before Our Lady with immense confidence and say: “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope!” That’s what we must do. Whoever turns to her is heeded. Just ask!
Someone may say: “But, Dr. Plínio, I asked for it and had the impression that things have worsened!” I answer: “Congratulations, my son, because those who begin to improve often feel things are worsening. Our Lady often puts us to the test. She makes us want even more what seems to be slipping away.”
Haven’t you seen a mother playing with a child and showing him a toy to entertain him? At a certain point, the child starts paying attention to something else, the mother pretends to take the toy away from him, and he picks it up. The thought of that toy entertains the child.
So it is with Our Lady: When she sees that we’re a bit numb to grace, she threatens us and gives us the impression that she’s taking it away. Congratulations, my son, Our Lady is drawing you to her when she seems to be withdrawing from you. Congratulations. Be happy, have courage, and have confidence. She will heed you.
We all have Guardian Angels and Patron Saints given to pray to Our Lady for us, and to pray to Our Lord Jesus Christ for us through Our Lady. Let us ask them: “Please assist us and help us!” Let us ask, ask, and ask!
No one’s prayer has ever been refused. If we spend a long time asking, seemingly without result, suddenly a dawn breaks before us: the expected result presents itself to us multiplied by a thousand.
So, dear friends, let’s remember this word of hope, this promise, and this advice to confide. And let us always move forward and upward, at all times and circumstances!
May Our Lady grant that the day will come when we see together, from afar, the approaching Reign of Mary.
[1] “Thau” is a word the Prophet Ezekiel (9:4) employed to describe his time of corruption. It is used in TFP to designate those who discern and reject the abominations of today’s world and seek to react against them.