B. The Church: Today’s Center of Conflict Between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution
In 1959, the year we wrote Revolution and the Counter-Revolution, the Church was considered the great spiritual force against the worldwide expansion of the communist sect.
In 1976, innumerable ecclesiastics, including bishops, figure as accomplices by omission, as collaborators, and even as driving forces of the Third Revolution. Progressivism, installed almost everywhere, is converting the formerly verdant forest of the Catholic Church into wood that can easily be set afire by communism.
In a word, the extent of this change is such that we do not hesitate to affirm that the center — the most sensitive and truly decisive point in the fight between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution — has shifted from the temporal to the spiritual society.
The Holy Church is now this center. In her, progressivists, cryptocommunists, and procommunists confront antiprogressivists and anticommunists.1
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Part III, Chapter II, pg. 150-151.
1 Since the 1930s, with the group that later founded the Brazilian TFP, we have been employing the best of our time and possibilities of action and combat in the battle leading up to the great battle inside the Church. Our first extensive undertaking in this struggle was the publication of the book Em Defesa da Ação Católica (São Paulo: Editoria Ave Maria, 1943), denouncing the resurgence of modernist errors in Brazils’s Cathoilc Action movement. It is also fitting to mention our much more recent study A Igreja ante a escalada da ameaça communista-Apelo aos Bispos silenciosos (São Paulo: Editora Ver Cruz, 1976), pp. 37-53.
Today, after more than forty years, the struggle is at its height, permitting one to foresee developments of an amplitude and intensity difficult to measure. In this struggle we are gladdened by the presence in the ranks of the TFPs and like organizations of so many new brothers-in-ideal, in over twenty countries on six continents. It is legitimate also on the battlefield for the soldiers of the good to say to one another: “Quam bonum et quam jucundum habitare fratres in unum” (“Behold how good it is and how pleasant where brethren dwell together in unity”) (Psalm 132:1).
