The True Friends of the People Are Traditionalists
From the apostolic letter Notre charge apostolique, August 25, 1910, of Saint Pius X:
Let not the priests be led astray in the maze of contemporary opinions, in the mirage of a false democracy. Let them not borrow from the rhetoric of the worst enemies of the Church and the people an emphatic language full of promises as sonorous as they are unattainable. Let them be persuaded that the social question and social science were not born yesterday, that the Church and the State, acting in concert, have always created productive organizations with this goal in mind; that the Church, which has never betrayed the happiness of the people with compromising alliances, has no reason to break away from the past and that it is enough for it to reconstruct, with the co-operation of the true builders of social restoration, the organizations destroyed by the Revolution, and to adapt them, in the same Christian spirit that inspired them, to the new milieu created by the material evolution of contemporary society; for the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries nor innovators but traditionalists. (Acta Apostolicae Sedis [Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1910], Vol. 2, p. 631).
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII: A Theme Illuminating American Social History (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Documents VI, p. 491.
