by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
The TFP is large today, but it was once very small. What a long way it has come! No one here felt this more than me. I lived [with this hope] between ages 10 and 20. For a child, a year is an eternity! All of you remember as children when entering school at the beginning of the year, the end of the year seemed to be an eternity away. So, if one year at that age took so long, imagine what ten years meant!
Some of the various TFP banners from around the world.
I lived ten years waiting and looking for someone who would join me in order to found our order of chivalry. Discreetly but constantly and obstinately, I never stopped looking even for a minute. All my searches were met with failure, complete failure. Hence, but for a special grace, at age twenty I should have understood that this order of chivalry was an order of utopia, an order of impossibility; and that in the generation that was growing up with me there was nothing left to do but to either surrender and join those who marched toward the shadows of death, or begin a frontal opposition, even more frontal than the one I had made up until then.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s First Holy Communion
I did not know what was in store for me. It was in this desolation and complete abandonment that, going by Patriarca Square, I saw a banner on the façade of the Santo Antônio Church. The doors of the impossible began to open up.
(Excerpt from a “Saint of the Day,” Friday, Oct. 6, 1989 – Nobility.org translation)
