C. Reactions Based on Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Has the efficacy of Revolution and Counter-Revolution been annulled by these numerous changes? On the contrary.
The Brazilian TFP collecting signatures for the 1968 campaign.
In 1968, the TFPs then existing in South America, inspired in particular by Part II of this essay (“The Counter-Revolution”), organized national petition drives addressed to Paul VI, requesting measures against leftist infiltration into the Catholic clergy and laity of South America.
Altogether, 2,060,368 people in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay signed the petition during a 58-day period.
In 1990, a campaign to free Lithuania from Communist Russia, which amounted to an incredible 5,218,520 signatures collected worldwide. Each petition sheet had twenty signatures on the front and twenty more on the back. One of the many campaigns over the years by the TFP, both in the US and abroad.
To our knowledge, it is the only mass petition – on any subject – signed by the sons of four South American nations. And, as far as we know, it is the largest petition in the history of these four countries.1
The answer of Paul VI was not merely silence and inaction. It was — how it pains us to say it — a series of acts whose effect continues to give prestige and facility of action to many promoters of Catholic leftism today.
At the sight of this rising tide of communist infiltration into the Holy Church, the TFPs and like organizations did not become discouraged. And in 1974 each of them published a declaration2 expressing their inconformity with the Vatican Ostpolitik and their resolve “to resist to the face.”3
And in Rio de Janeiro.
One of the declaration’s passages, referring to Paul VI, expresses the document’s spirit:
On our knees, gazing with veneration at the person of His Holiness Pope Paul VI, we express all our fidelity to him. In this filial act we say to the Pastor of Pastors: “Our soul is Yours, our life is Yours. Order us to do whatever you wish. Only do not order us to cross our arms in face of the assailing Red wolf. To this our conscience is opposed.”
Not stopping at these efforts, the TFPs and like organizations in their respective countries promoted during the course of 1976 nine editions of the Chilean TFP best-seller, The Church of Silence in Chile: The TFP Proclaims the Whole Truth.4
In almost all countries, the respective edition included a prologue describing numerous and impressive national events analogous to what had occurred in Chile.
The response of the public to this great publicity effort can be termed a victory: 56,000 copies were printed in South America alone, where, in the most populous countries, the total pressrun of a book of this nature, when successful, is usually 5,000 copies.
In Spain, more than 1,000 secular and regular priests from all regions of the country signed an impressive petition giving the Sociedad Cultural Covadonga5 their firm support for the courageous prologue of the book’s Spanish edition.
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. 151-153
1 In 1990 the TFPs surpassed this record with the largest petition drive in history. They gathered 5,212,580 signatures for the liberation of Lithuania, then under the Soviet yoke.
2 Titled “The Vatican Policy of Distention Toward the Communist Governments — The Question for the TFP: To Take No Stand? Or to Resist?,” this declaration, a veritable manifesto, was published, beginning in April 1974, in 57 newspapers in 11 countries. – Ed.
3 Gal. 2:l1.
4 This work — monumental for its documentation, its argumentation, and the theses it defends — had a truly epic forerunner even before the installation of communism in Chile, namely, Fabio Vidigal Xavier da Silveira’s Frei: El Kerensky Chileno. It denounced the decisive collaboration of the Chilean Christian Democratic party and its leader Eduardo Frei, then president of the country, in paving the way for the Marxist victory. Published in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Italy, and Venezuela, the book went through seventeen printings, with more than 100,000 copies.
5 Today the Spanish TFP: Sociedad Espanola de Defensa de la Tradicion, Familia y Propiedad-TFP Covadonga.
