By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Battles that sometimes took eight hundred years, as did the Spanish and Portuguese Reconquista. Think about the meaning of eight hundred years of warfare! We are in the year 1973; the time span from the 1173 to 1973 was the time it took for the Reconquista. There were many generations of knights who fought. They fought hard, with pride, enthusiastically, merrily, with hope, and so there was no obstacle they failed to overcome.
The Battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571 by Pieter Brünniche
What is more, as they conquered and enlarged the empire of Christ, both on the Rhine front and on the Spanish-Portuguese front, Christian civilization gradually spread as they passed, as if they had been spreading flowers. Cathedrals were erected, universities built, the magnificent structure of feudal society established.
Why did that happen? It happened because that whole society was enthusiastically proud of being Catholic. It lived off the joy of being Catholic, off the admiration for that in which it believed; and since it believed in the truth, God blessed it both at war and at peace. In war, they won; in peace, they built. And when the Middle Ages came to an end, these centuries of enthusiasm and chivalry left behind the greatest amount of progress humanity had ever achieved.
Therefore, this enthusiastic pride, my dear friends, is not only the feeling of possessing a higher good but it is a deeply humble feeling, while at the same time profoundly gallant and warlike. The true medieval knight was not proud of being Catholic because the profession of faith adorned him in the eyes of men. Christian pride, the enthusiastic pride of true chivalry, the chivalry of the Crusades rather than the decadent and quixotic chivalry of troubadours and courtly love, the true Chivalry achieved that law of love of which St. Augustine spoke: man carried enthusiasm to the point of being proud only of God and forgetting about self. Whereas false enthusiasm, pride without humility, causes man to be so proud of himself as to forget about God.
St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Painting by Marcos da Cruz
It was, therefore, an unpretentious pride. But it was such an enthusiastic pride that in his Introduction to the Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Montalembert recounts an episode that profoundly impressed me: a Moorish prisoner traveling through the lands of Europe and looking at the great cathedrals, asked who had built them. And someone pointed out some lay brothers of a religious Order who were there and who had participated in the great work. And he, after analyzing those lay brothers so unpretentious, humble, and effaced, thinking so much about God and so little about themselves, asked the perfectly sagacious question: How can it be that such humble men managed to build such lofty monuments?
The reason is that the true Catholic is enthusiastically proud of God, for the cause of the Church, but is humble in regard to himself. He does not want glories. He wants victory for God alone, according to the famous prayer we find in Scripture: Non mihi, Domine, non mihi, sed nomine tuo da gloriam: Render glory not to me, o Lord, but to thy Name. Let the Church shine, let Christian civilization shine forth, let the cause of tradition, family and property win as pillars of the Reign of Mary to be born from the remnants of the Christian order that was once implanted on earth, as a link arching over the night of the Revolution, a link between the medieval past and the world to come; let family, tradition and property shine forth to render glory to Our Lady.
That is what a TFP member desires. He wants the standard to be raised high in public places, that this motto is known to all and project its beneficial and exorcizing influence upon today’s world. The motto remains, the ideal remains, the fruit of one’s work remains. The member will pass; all of us here will pass. Heaven and earth will pass, but one day we will have our reward.
Some of the various TFP banners from around the world.
On that supreme day, when the Son of God comes to this world with great pomp and majesty to judge the living and the dead, and the angel sounds the trumpet to resurrect both the good and the bad for their punishment or reward, may we find ourselves, through the prayers of Mary and through Divine mercy, among those who will hear that most glorious invitation which contains all the glories that man can imagine: Come, chosen ones, to partake of my glory. You fought for me. You were not ashamed of Me on earth, while men were ashamed of my Name; and so I now confess you before the angels of God. Come and occupy the thrones of glory to which you have been called.
That will be the moment when a great hymn of enthusiasm will reverberate across the celestial choirs, an immense chant of thanksgiving will rise from the souls of all men born of Adam and Eve and redeemed by Our Lord Jesus Christ, and history will be consummated. This history in which we will have played a role with our sacrifice, self-denial, and struggle. We will have been part of those who, in the twentieth century, repeated the feats of the warriors of bygone ages and paved the way for the warriors of the ages to come.
We are sons of this militant Church, which will fight until the end of times because she was established to fight evil in a permanent challenge whereby, looking at evil, however powerful, influential, ornate and prestigious it may be, men will know how to look at it with contempt, tell it the whole truth, attack and overcome it in the name of Jesus and Mary.
You, my dear friends, will now begin the battle of everyday life. You will enter into daily life and be assailed by all the factors of disintegration of today’s world. You will have to face insolent and arrogant sexual aggression, and do so with enthusiastic pride. Unashamed of the virtue you were called to practice, but enthusiastically proud of a virtue that was given to you and which you would not have if Our Lady had not obtained it for us at the Cross at the moment that Our Lord expired.
But you will do so with this enthusiasm full of love, full of self-assurance, with integral faith and love, confessing the ideal of Catholic purity, and disdaining the disdain of those who dare mock the children of light in the name of impurity.
A prayerful protest in front of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania abortion facility.
You will represent tradition at a time when progress is spoken of as contrary to tradition. By your attire and your bearing, you will constantly challenge those who think that it is a manifestation of character to trample tradition and follow other people’s examples like a bunch of sheep.
You will be sacred, standing in indignant inconformity. With strength and enthusiasm, you will affirm the necessity of decorum, bearing, and a noble attitude to express a noble soul, in a world in which metaphysical, philosophical and religious values are so well expressed by the word nobility that Pius XII wrote that nothing is preserved, even in genuine democracies, without truly aristocratic institutions. You will represent the nobility within the degradation and degeneracy of the contemporary world.
Ten Reasons Why Homosexual”Marriage” is Harmful and Must be Opposed Flyer.
You will have to fight a thousand times, and perhaps even with those close to you. Scripture says that man’s enemy is often the one near him. And you will have to face this struggle with gallantry, love, and irreducible and inflexible intransigence.
You will play the game and do the work of fidelity. But when you pass by, what will happen is precisely what this audience is a proof of: While crossing the seas of incomprehension, some souls from here and there will look at you. Many will say: how marvelous! And–why not?—some will begin to applaud you. And others will begin to follow you. And just as we were few in this march toward the sun, toward glory, toward the Reign of Mary, and yet today we are spread across a whole continent and arrive at the Old World, so also our ranks will swell as we walk together along the way.
And this world which is losing confidence in itself will look at your self-assurance, will look at your faith and will begin to listen to your voice more and more. The proof that the TFP does not preach in a desert, the proof that its voice is understood, is this historical and indisputable fact: All our campaigns have been victorious, and at this very moment, the TFP is addressing Brazil’s population. In a campaign of just over a month, we have sold more 40,000 copies of the Pastoral Letter by Dom Antonio de Castro Mayer, when a run of 4,000 copies is deemed large for any printed book.
This means that the public listens to us, that the public has confidence in us, that while one sector or another may at times listen to the voice of defamation, in times of great and serious crises we are listened to and followed.
And thus something is maturing, transforming, germinating, as spring germinates under the snow. You are those germinating springtime seeds; you and all those that you are called to bring. My dear friends, be proud, enthusiastic and courageous! Go, and may Our Lady accompany you so that, when returning here next year, you will have brought many more so we can celebrate together the victory of Our Lady today, as we await the great victories of tomorrow.
Deus vult! God wills it! Have enthusiasm for Our Lady!
(Address for the Closing Session of the 16th SEFAC, Sunday, Jan. 21, 1973 — Nobility.org translation)
