by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
I remember perfectly the moment I met him, back in the distant year of 1935. I had just attended an act of my Marian Sodality at the Santa Cecília parish church. As I left through the back of the church and crossed the courtyard immediately behind the main chapel, someone stopped me to introduce a Sodality member who had come from Rio to work in São Paulo as an engineer. He was known to be intelligent, cultured, and exemplary. We greeted each other, and he introduced himself as José de Azeredo Santos. Thus began a collaboration between us, which quickly developed into a friendship that lasted about forty years. That is, until the moment when God called him to Himself, while I, kneeling beside his bed of pain at the Samaritano Hospital, recited on his behalf the famous consecration to Our Lady by St. Louis Grignion de Montfort.
Today, I wish to introduce the reader to this longtime friend, one of the TFP’s founding members and directors, whose beautiful and interesting soul deserves to be widely known.
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The elements that made up my late friend’s personality were somewhat disparate but came together in a way that created a harmonious diversity with a pleasant effect.
Perhaps his open, cheerful manner stemmed from his years in Rio. Azeredo liked to intersperse serious conversations with witty remarks. Cultured, intelligent, and lively in his presentation, he did not disdain the most common topics of everyday life, which he knew how to elevate by sprinkling them with colorful observations and harmless sarcasm. In short, he was a typical example of an accomplished conversationalist, in the style that was in vogue at the time, when the art of conversation had not yet died out.
This pleasant exterior did not prevent Azeredo from being, at the core of his personality, a meditative, profound soul whose life, by strengthening the Minas Gerais temperament of this son of Nova Lima, may have sharpened it to the point of making him somewhat wary.
This wariness—which I never saw directed at us, his close friends—was a treasure in Azeredo’s soul and life.
Thus, I heard that his technical work as an engineer was marked by an abundance of precautions, making it rock-solid.
For the same reason, his observations of people, ideologies, and facts were marked by a sharp vision that made them especially compelling.
His arguments were not only marked by exceptional solidity but also documented with unusual abundance: a precaution against any possible opponent who might resort to sophistry.
A suspicious person is usually acidic. Azeredo was an exception to the rule. I have mentioned his manner’s invariable pleasantness, a reflection of his character. To illustrate this pleasantness in all its aspects, it should be added that Azeredo was a loving father, like few others I have known. He lost his young and virtuous wife many years ago. She left behind three daughters, whose upbringing Azeredo completed with more maternal than paternal affection. An always nostalgic widower, he identified the place outside the cemetery closest to the spot where his wife sleeps her last sleep. Late at night, after finishing the work of the apostolate to which he devoted the last hours of the day, Azeredo would sometimes go near his wife’s grave to finish part of the Rosary, which he had not completed due to his excessive workload. I think that this touching detail, which he once let slip in conversation some time after becoming a widower, says it all.
Today, as I write, his remains lie beside those of his beloved wife, in his early hours of the great sleep that the Resurrection will joyfully interrupt.
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This multifaceted mind, composed of harmonious opposites, explains Azeredo’s actions in the work developed by the pre-TFP and later by the TFP.
Except for a three-year period from 1948 to 1950, we always directed a Catholic cultural newspaper. From 1933 to 1947, we directed Legionário, a Catholic weekly in São Paulo. From 1951 to the present, we have directed Catolicismo, a monthly cultural magazine published under the aegis of Most Rev. Antônio de Castro Mayer, the great Bishop of Campos.
Throughout these years, Azeredo has been a tenacious fighter in our columns. A profound, lively, brilliant journalist, he was a polemicist in the true sense of the word. As such, his name is inscribed in our annals in letters of gold.
Azeredo’s mountainous perspicacity led him to focus with particular acuity on the semi-underground movements that began to stir Catholic circles around 1940, from which progressivism eventually emerged.
He was a man of faith, armed with a solid, albeit non-specialized culture, and he saw the danger that many specialists overlooked. He entered the fray, fighting the good fight at the very moment the great stampede of specialists was leaving the sacred wall of orthodoxy unprotected.
Hence, he published substantial and sparkling articles on Maritainism, the “policy of the extended hand,” modern art, Gnosticism, and Catholic leftism, to which opponents, of course, never dared respond openly.
Have you ever thought, reader, what these forty years of pugnacity mean, maintained at the expense of little rest and lived under the blows of misunderstanding and hostility? Add to this effort the fact that it was not rewarded with the slightest financial reward or the praise of the trumpets of notoriety, and you will have an idea of the value of the services Azeredo built up.
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