Original audio (in portoghese)
Auditorium of the Belo Horizonte School of Medicine, October 30, 1961
by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
After the lecture that the Catholic leader and founder of the Brazilian TFP gave against socialist and confiscatory agrarian reform, he answered several questions asked by young university students present there.
To hear or read the full text of Dr. Plinio’s presentation, click here.
* * *
I am distressed to see that the hand of a young man, and a young Brazilian, educated enough to have formulated his questions in polite terms, asks me the following question:
Gentlemen, look behind this young agrarian reformist compatriot of mine, and without him perhaps suspecting it, what is there:
“What will be your position after the next Brazilian socialist revolution? Because if you are in favor of the struggle for life, you will have to adapt.“
I can see clearly what the question behind this is. [laughter] I can see that this question is not about the ”struggle for life.”
What I am doing here, my young friend, is much more than a struggle for life. I am not earning a penny, I am not taking advantage of anything. I am devoting a busy night of my existence to doing something infinitely more noble than the struggle for life: it is the struggle for a principle. I am fighting for much more than life.
But behind that question, what is naturally there is the firing squad. And I must say: if someday, some wall must be splattered with my blood, dying for the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, before I die I will say of myself what Job said of himself: “Blessed be the day that saw me born, and blessed be the stars that saw me as a little child!”
[Prolonged applause]