The Catholic Left: Expansions and Silences – Folha de S. Paulo, December 26, 1976
by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
In every school, most students frown upon the staff responsible for monitoring and enforcing discipline. This is because, as in all communities, the vast majority comprises ordinary people. Although ordinary people do not usually break the rules, they may commit a transgression in certain circumstances. Hence, they see those who maintain discipline as potential aggressors.
This state of mind persists among young people throughout their lives and significantly contributes to a considerable, or even very considerable, number of adults viewing law enforcement officers with antipathy, especially in large urban centers.
Colonel Erasmo Dias, the Secretary of Public Security of São Paulo, is a brilliant exception to this rule. Through his firm action against crime—both common and political—he has given the people the comforting feeling of being effectively protected from the dangers lurking around every corner.
Furthermore, Col. Dias connects with the population through frank, strong, and direct language and an unpretentious yet authentic verve. It is not surprising, then, that he has become a widely popular public figure.
And the people agree with impartial observers who recognize the authentic services he has rendered to São Paulo in his role as Secretary.
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None of this was taken into account by the Catholic left in the furious publicity campaign it has been promoting against the Secretary of Security for having asserted that Most Rev. Tomás Balduino, Bishop of Goiás, and Friar Domingos Maia Leite O.P. maintain suspicious contacts with subversives and for having published an exchange of letters between those clergymen and convicted political prisoners.
I have never met Col. Dias in person, nor am I sufficiently familiar with the legal provisions governing the confidentiality of political prisoners’ correspondence. However, I am very familiar with the Catholic left and its fuss, which enables me to comment on the case.
Even if Col. Dias did not have the right to publish such letters, which I find unlikely, I would like to point out to the reader the one-sidedness of this uproar.
The latter was framed in the name of human rights. However, it proceeds as if these rights belonged only to subversives, not to defenders of the law. The Catholic left does not extend to the Secretary of Security the impartiality it earnestly and rightly demands on behalf of those accused of subversion.
In fact, if Catholic leftists respected human rights, they should recognize Col. Dias’ merits at the very moment they attack his real or alleged faults. This is what impartiality would dictate, and Col. Dias deserves it, like any man. But this is entirely absent from the statements and communiqués of those attacking the secretary.
Once again, it seems that, according to the authors of this uproar, being human requires being subversive.
But someone may argue that Bishop Tomás Balduino’s, Friar Domingos’s, and the entire Catholic left’s anger is well-founded, since the Secretary of Security has branded both clergymen as pro-Communist or something of the sort. Against such an accusation, they have the right, and more so, the duty, to defend themselves.
I am entirely certain that a clergyman accused of being a communist or pro-communist has a duty to defend himself. The Catholic left does not seem equally convinced of this. It seems to find it entirely natural that Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga, whom I so clearly and thoroughly targeted in my book The Church Facing the Escalating Communist Threat, has not yet done so.
Why do these Catholic leftists, clergy or laity, consider it so necessary for Bishop Tomás Balduino to defend himself, yet deem it perfectly superfluous for Bishop Casaldáliga to do so? Can any Catholic leftist explain this contradiction to me?
Let it not be said that the prelate of São Felix do Araguaia did not defend himself because he considered the accuser insignificant. Even if he thinks so, the accusation is far from trivial.
Nor are the readers of the 35,000 copies of the book already sold among us unimportant.
And if this book is so insignificant, why did Cardinal Arns, his eight auxiliary bishops, Bishop Ivo Lorscheiter, CNBB’s secretary general, and the Metropolitan Chancery of Recife hastily publish acrimonious statements against it (albeit entirely devoid of argument) in the Portuguese edition of L’Osservatore Romano?
This emptiness is also evident in a recent comment from the CNBB press office. In reference to my recently published book, Fr. José Dias, advisor to the CNBB, sought to exonerate Bishop Casaldáliga by appealing to a major 19th-century literary figure. He said that finding communism in Bishop Casaldáliga’s poetry is the same as finding pornography in the work of Castro Alves (cf. Folha de S. Paulo, December 19, 1976).
This easy way out shifts the controversy to Castro Alves, so that, by some strange analogy, one could deduce that there is communism in Bishop Casaldáliga’s poetry only after determining whether there are immoralities in Castro Alves’ work. While the latter is being discussed, the public would forget about Bishop Casaldáliga.
For my part, I would say that sympathy for communism is evident in Pedro Casaldáliga, who calls himself “Monsignor Hammer and Sickle,” and that a lack of insight is evident in CNBB’s press office.
In fact, my book called into question not only Bishop Casaldáliga but also the Southern Region II of the CNBB in Paraná. Why did the CNBB press officer not mention this?
Why does Paraná’s episcopal body not defend itself when it considers it the right and duty of bishops to do so in the case of the letters published by Col. Dias?
