This terrible enemy has a name: It is called the Revolution.
Its profound cause is an explosion of pride and sensuality that has inspired, not one system, but, rather, a whole chain of ideological systems. Their wide acceptance gave rise to the three great revolutions in the history of the West: the Pseudo-Reformation, the French Revolution, and Communism.2
A Homosexual pride march, June 18, 2011. Rainbow flag outstretched in March in front of the government of Les Minimes, Toulouse, Central Pyrenees, France. Photo by Guillaume Paumier.
Pride leads to hatred of all superiority and, thus, to the affirmation that inequality is an evil in itself at all levels, principally at the metaphysical and religious ones. This is the egalitarian aspect of the Revolution.
Sensuality, per se, tends to sweep aside all barriers. It does not accept restraints and leads to revolt against all authority and law, divine or human, ecclesiastical or civil. This is the liberal aspect of the Revolution.
Both aspects, which in the final analysis have a metaphysical character, seem contradictory on many occasions. But they are reconciled in the Marxist utopia of an anarchic paradise where a highly evolved mankind, “emancipated” from religion, would live in utmost order without political authority in total freedom. This, however, would not give rise to any inequality.
One of the signs at the Women’s March 1-21-17. Photo by Edward Kimmel.
The Pseudo-Reformation was a first revolution. It implanted, in varying degrees, the spirit of doubt, religious liberalism, and ecclesiastical egalitarianism in the different sects it produced.
The French Revolution came next. It was the triumph of egalitarianism in two fields: the religious field in the form of atheism, speciously labeled as secularism; and the political field through the false maxim that all inequality is an injustice, all authority a danger, and freedom the supreme good.
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.
Communism is the transposition of these maxims to the socioeconomic field.
These three revolutions are episodes of one single Revolution, within which socialism, liturgicism, the politique de la main tendue (policy of the extended hand), and the like are only transitional stages or attenuated manifestations.
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2. Cf. Leo XIII, apostolic letter Parvenu á la vingt-cinquième année, March 19, 1902, in Fr. John J. Wynne, S.J., The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII (New York: Benziger Bros., 1903) pp.559-560.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Introduction, Pages 3-4.
