The Joy of Praise – Folha de S. Paulo, June 18, 1972
by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
A few days ago, the national press published brief excerpts from Cardinal Antonio Caggiano’s address as Archbishop of Buenos Aires at the Shrine of Our Lady of Luján during the opening Mass of the recent Argentine Bishops’ meeting.
The published texts seemed so suggestive that I searched the Buenos Aires press for more detailed information about the eminent cardinal’s homily. I found extensive quotations from his address in La Nación on May 9. Many of the topics reported in our sister country’s leading newspaper remain strikingly relevant more than a month later. They are also of interest beyond Argentina’s borders because they concern the crisis, unfortunately affecting the Catholic Church throughout the world. Thus, I thought it would be a service to my readers to reproduce some of the most relevant observations and reflections expressed by Cardinal Antonio Caggiano.
Although I have a few reservations about one or two points in the text of the distinguished Archbishop of Buenos Aires, I am certain that, with his speech, he has rendered distinguished service to his country and to all of Latin America.
As I say this, I feel true joy—the delightful joy of praise. Those outside my circles see me as a combative man accustomed to controversy. The truth is precisely the opposite. I am prudent to the point of being almost phlegmatic and happy to agree and praise. I do not get involved in so many controversies for pleasure but out of a sense of duty. In fact, today, many more issues call for criticism than invite praise, so the opportunity to offer serious and sincere praise rarely arises. When it does, the joy of doing so is all the more precious. This joy is refined when the praise is directed at the words of a high-ranking member of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Nothing is more gratifying for a child than praising his father. In a sense, Catholics see every hierarch of God’s Holy Church as a father.
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I highlight the first topic in Cardinal Caggiano’s sermon:
“A profound crisis, not only disciplinary but also doctrinal, has erupted within the Church with the violence of a storm. There is no longer a desire to use what is transitory and changeable to meet the demands of human transformation, as H.H. John XXIII longed for, but rather an obsession with structural reforms, sparing neither the very Divine constitution of the Church nor its Magisterium of revealed truth. The crisis is therefore also one of faith. It is serious and widespread. It visibly affects the unity of the Church and the people of God, who contemplate and feel it with sadness, suffering the impact of this scandal.
“We suffer and fear more serious consequences in both the religious and civil orders; above all, we feel the need for God’s help, which we humbly implore today through the intercession of our Heavenly Mother under her title of Luján.”
Here is a panorama that many do not see or feign to ignore.
* * *
After these lucid and serious words, Archbishop Caggiano highlights the link between religious reformism and subversion. Here again, his words merit careful reading and analysis:
“First of all, at this grave and decisive moment, we owe it to the nation and to public opinion to tell the truth about the dangers threatening the nation. …
“The crisis we face is very serious because it is fundamentally a moral crisis that cannot be remedied by decrees or by imposition. The problems and dangers are manifold, but one stands out as the most serious and urgent.
“Public opinion as a whole must recognize the imminent danger of replacing our traditional, free, and democratic institutions with a materialistic, totalitarian, Marxist, and anti-human government. This is the sole purpose of the so-called socialist regime, with the total eradication of private property rights and even the instruments of labor in companies.
“Psychological warfare has been carefully employed to strip many words of their meaning and give them new ones. Thus, while behind the Iron Curtain, the inhuman regime that has interposed that same curtain between brothers calls itself ‘Socialist Republics,’ very few people on our continent are alarmed when some of their fellow citizens attempt to implement a socialist regime with the above-mentioned characteristics.”
Here, with the authority of a pastor, the cardinal masterfully underscores the fundamentally moral—and therefore religious—nature of the social question and the gravity of the communist threat.
After noting that the Catholic and socialist vocabularies share identical words, the prelate shows how psychological warfare obscures the fact that the two vocabularies assign diametrically opposite meanings to those words. Through this confusion, the communists cunningly attempt to draw Catholic opinion to their side.
Archbishop Caggiano says:
“In the Church’s social doctrine, equality, justice, and evangelical solidarity are grounded first in love; not human love but charitable love, which presupposes a theocentric religion.
“Second, on free will, individual decisions or determinations are the most sacred thing in a person, and consequently, as respectable as the person herself, in solidarity and respect for the human person, whose rights are contained in the fulfillment of the new mandate the Lord gave his disciples by saying: ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’
“Is this perhaps the equality, justice, and solidarity of the ideology of Iron Curtain socialism? Yet, to the shame of civilization, this curtain is visible to all, and future generations will find it hard to believe … that the Iron Curtain’s infamy divided brothers. Behind it lies the structuring of social life by quantitative criteria, continuous arrogance and arbitrariness, and collectivism imposed by state totalitarianism.”
In the broader context of Archbishop Antonio Caggiano’s speech, “Catholic” neo-reformism has two aspects, one essentially religious and the other socio-economic. The former is an attack on the Church’s dogmas and structure. The latter is an assault on Western nations and their traditions and structures.
Thus, the great religious crisis affecting the Church also calls into question the temporal order and civilization. I conclude that this makes it impossible for anyone to align with those seeking to destroy the ecclesiastical order without being a supporter (if not an agent) of subversion.
This is another important conclusion that cannot be ignored in today’s world.
