Legionário, São Paulo (Brazil), No. 472, September 28, 1941
By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
The doctrine of Our Lord Jesus Christ is full of seemingly contradictory truths which, however, when examined closely, far from contradicting each other, complement each other, forming a truly wonderful harmony. This is the case, for example, with the apparent contradiction between divine justice and divine goodness. God is at once infinitely just and infinitely merciful. Whenever we close our eyes to one of these perfections in order to understand the other, we fall into grave error. Our Lord Jesus Christ gave admirable proof of His gentleness and His severity during His earthly life. Let us not attempt to “correct” the personality of Our Lord according to the narrowness of our views, and close our eyes to His gentleness in order to better edify ourselves with the justice of the Savior; or, on the contrary, let us not ignore His justice in order to better understand His infinite compassion for sinners. Our Lord showed Himself to be perfect and adorable both when He welcomed Mary Magdalene with ineffably sweet forgiveness and when He punished the Pharisees with violent language. Let us not tear any of these pages from the Holy Gospel. Let us understand and adore the perfections of Our Lord as they are revealed in both episodes. And let us understand, finally, that our imitation of Our Lord Jesus Christ will only be perfect on the day when we know not only how to forgive, console, and caress, but also on the day when we know how to scourge, denounce, and condemn like Our Lord.
There are many Catholics who consider the episodes in the Gospel in which the holy fury of the Messiah against the ignominy and perfidy of the Pharisees appears as things unworthy of imitation. At least that is what can be inferred from the way they consider the apostolate. They always speak of gentleness, and always seek to imitate this virtue of Our Lord. May God bless them for this. But why do they not seek to imitate the other virtues of Our Lord?
Very often, when some act of energy is proposed in matters of the apostolate, the invariable response is that it is necessary to proceed with great gentleness “so as not to alienate the straying even more.” Can it be maintained that acts of energy always have the invariable effect of “alienating the straying even more”? Could it be argued that Our Lord, when He addressed His fiery invectives to the Pharisees, did so with the intention of “alienating those who have gone astray even more”? Or should we suppose that Our Lord did not know or did not care about the “catastrophic” effect His words would have on the Pharisees? Who would dare to admit such blasphemy against the Incarnate Wisdom that was Our Lord?
God forbid that we should advocate the use of energy and violent processes as the only remedy for souls. God forbid, however, that we should proscribe these heroic remedies from our apostolic processes. There are circumstances in which one must be gentle and circumstances in which one must be holy violent. To be gentle when circumstances demand violence, or to be violent when circumstances demand gentleness, is always a grave evil.
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This whole one-sided line of thinking that we have been denouncing stems from an equally one-sided interpretation of the Parables. There are many people who make the parable of the lost sheep the only one in the Gospel. Now, there is a very serious error in this that we must denounce.
Our Lord does not speak to us only of lost sheep that the Shepherd patiently seeks out at the bottom of the abyss, bloodied by the thorns that have sadly wounded them. Our Lord also speaks to us of ravenous wolves that constantly circle the sheepfold, waiting for an opportunity to enter disguised in sheep’s clothing. Now, if the Shepherd who tenderly carries the lost sheep on his shoulders is admirable, what can be said of the Shepherd who abandons his faithful sheep to go far away to fetch a wolf disguised as a sheep, who lovingly takes the wolf on his shoulders, opens the doors of the sheepfold himself, and with his pastoral hands places the ravenous wolf among the sheep?
However, if Catholics effectively applied the principles of unilateral apostolate that they profess, they would act exactly like this!
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To better understand that the perfect imitation of Our Lord consists not only in gentleness and meekness, but also in energy, we will cite some episodes or phrases from certain saints. A saint is one whom the Church has declared, with infallible authority, to be a perfect imitator of Our Lord. How did the saints imitate Our Lord? Let’s see.
St. Ignatius of Antioch, a martyr of the second century, wrote several letters to various Churches before being martyred. In these letters, expressions such as these occur about heretics: “ferocious beasts” (Eph. 7); “ravenous wolves” (Phil. 2:2); damned dogs that attack treacherously (Eph. 7); beasts with human faces (Smyrn. 4:1); weeds of the devil (Eph. 10:1); parasitic plants that the Father did not plant (Tral. 11); plants destined for eternal fire (Eph. 16:2).”
This way of treating heretics, as can be seen, closely followed the examples of St. John the Baptist, who called the scribes and Pharisees a “brood of vipers,” and of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who called them ‘hypocrites’ and “whitewashed tombs.”
The Apostles also proceeded in this manner. St. Irenaeus, a martyr of the second century and disciple of St. Polycarp, who in turn was a disciple of St. John the Evangelist, recounts that once, when the apostle went to the baths, he left without washing because he saw Corinth there, a heretic who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, fearing, he said, that the building would collapse, because Corinth, the enemy of truth, was there. The same Saint Polycarp, meeting Marcion, a Docetist heretic, one day and being asked by him if he knew him, replied: “Without a doubt, you are the firstborn of Satan.”
In fact, in this he was following the advice of St. Paul: “A heretic, after one or two warnings, avoid, for he is already perverse and condemns himself” (Titus 3:10).
St. Polycarp himself, if he happened to meet a heretic, would cover his ears and exclaim: “God of goodness, why have you kept me on earth to endure such things?” And he would immediately flee to avoid such company.
In the fourth century, St. Athanasius recounts that St. Anthony the Hermit called the speeches of heretics more poisonous than those of snakes.
And, in general, this is how the Holy Fathers treated heretics, as can be seen from an article published in “Civiltà Cattolica,” a periodical founded by His Holiness Pius IX and entrusted to the Jesuit priests of Rome. In this article, several examples are cited, which I will transcribe:
“St. Thomas Aquinas, who is sometimes presented as invariably peaceful toward his enemies, in one of his first controversies with William of Saint-Amour, who had not yet been condemned by the Church, treats him and his followers as follows: ‘enemies of God, ministers of the devil, members of the Antichrist, enemies of the salvation of mankind, slanderers, sowers of blasphemy, reprobates, perverse, ignorant, equal to Pharaoh, worse than Jovinian and Vigilantius (heretics who denied the Virginity of Our Lady).” St. Bonaventure called his contemporary Gerald: “protervo, slanderer, madman, poisoner, ignorant, deceiver, evil, senseless, perfidious.”
The mellifluous St. Bernard, speaking of Arnold of Brescia, who raised schism against the clergy and ecclesiastical property, said: “disorderly, vagabond, impostor, vessel of ignominy, scorpion vomited from Brescia, viewed with horror in Rome, with abomination in Germany, despised by the Roman Pontiff, praised by the devil, worker of iniquities, devourer of the people, mouth full of curses, sower of discord, maker of schisms, ferocious wolf.”
Earlier, St. Gregory the Great, rebuking John, Bishop of Constantinople, throws in his face his profane and nefarious pride, his Luciferian arrogance, his foolish words, his vanity, and his lack of intelligence.
Nor did Saints Fulgentius, Prosper, Jerome, Pope Siricius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Hilary, Athanasius, Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, the holy martyrs Cornelius and Cyprian, Antenagoras, Irenaeus, Polycarp, Ignatius Martyr, Clement, all the Fathers of the Church who distinguished themselves by their heroic virtue.
If you want to know what rules the Doctors and Theologians of the Church give for polemics with heretics, read what St. Francis de Sales, the gentle St. Francis de Sales, says in Philothea, chapter XX of part II: “The declared enemies of God and the Church must be defamed as much as possible (provided that the truth is not violated), and it is an act of charity to cry out: Behold the wolf! when he is among the flock, or wherever he may be found.“
Thus far, quotations from the article in ”Civiltà Cattolica“, vol. I, ser. V, p. 27.
If the ”Legionario” published only half of what has been said against the modern enemies of the Church, what protests it would have to hear!
