Foreword

Since its first publication in the Brazilian cultural journal Catolicismo in 1959, Revolution and Counter-Revolution has gone through a number of editions in Portuguese, English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

The present edition is the first to be published digitally in the United States. It includes recent commentaries on Revolution and Counter-Revolution’s third part, which was added by the author in 1976.

Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the basic book and inspiration of the many autonomous Societies for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property and like organizations, contains principles of wisdom that can efficaciously stop the disintegration of civilization in the world today.
The author of this work is the world-famous Brazilian Catholic philosopher Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. Over the years he has written numerous works that have received noteworthy ecclesiastical approbation.

For example, in the late 40s, his Em Defesa da Acão Catolica, denouncing the danger presented by leftists encysted in the Catholic Action movement, prompted a letter of praise from Msgr. Montini, then substitute for the Vatican secretary of state, written on behalf of Pius XII.

Special mention should be made of his book, In Defense of Catholic Action (1943), honored with a letter of praise sent to the author, on behalf of Pope Pius XII, by Msgr. G. B. Montini, then substitute to the Vatican Secretary of State and later Pope Paul VI.

In another work, The Church and the Communist State: The Impossible Coexistence (1963), the author proved that a Catholic could not view the establishment of a communist regime in his country as morally acceptable. The Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities called this work “a most faithful echo of all the Documents of the supreme Magisterium of the Church, including the luminous encyclicals Mater et Magistra of John XXIII and Ecclesiam Suam of Paul VI.”

In 1992, he wrote Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII contrasting two models of society. The first model is Christian, founded on the idea that God wills proportional and harmonic inequalities among the social classes, all of whose members are entitled to at least sufficient living conditions. The second model is based on the erroneous idea that all inequality is unjust. The book has been acclaimed in eloquent letters by Silvio Cardinal Oddi, Mario Luigi Cardinal Ciappi, Alfons M. Cardinal Stickler, theologian Fr. Raimondo Spiazzi, Thomist Fr. Victorino Rodriguez y Rodriguez, and canonist Fr. Anastasio Gutierrez.

Yet, the most significant of Professor Corrêa de Oliveira’s works is Revolution and Counter-Revolution. Its significance was quickly recognized. Eugene Cardinal Tisserant wrote: “The theme of this study is of the highest importance for the time in which we live… The analysis made by Professor Corrêa de Oliveira is clear, precise and accurate… It will be of interest to a considerable number of our fellow citizens. I congratulate the author of this magnificent work.” Thomas Cardinal Tien, of China, stated: “Those of us who personally suffer from the effects of communism are well able to calculate the accuracy and urgent necessity of such a study.”

All the editions of Revolution and Counter-Revolution have concluded with these words:

We have not the slightest doubt in our heart about any of the theses that constitute this work. Nevertheless, we subject them all unrestrictedly to the judgment of the Vicar of Christ and are disposed to renounce immediately any one of them if it depart even slightly from the teaching of the Holy Church, our Mother, the Ark of Salvation, and the Gate of Heaven.

Over forty years have passed since this statement was first published. In the meantime, Revolution and Counter-Revolution has been spread throughout the world without any of its theses being challenged as contrary to the Church’s Magisterium. This fact corroborates the earlier approbations and testifies to the integrity of this enduring work.

To this must be added another fact of enormous gravity. In the third part of the present work, the author states that the main battleground of the struggle between anti-order (the Revolution) and order (the Counter-Revolution) is no longer civil society but the Holy Church herself.

Such a terrible state of affairs is of first concern to Catholics. But it is also of concern to all men of good will, for without the influence of the Church, temporal society will never rise from the prostration to which it has been reduced by the same enemy: the Revolution.

People seeking the most effective way to combat this enemy will welcome a book that provides the principles needed for the pursuit of this struggle.

The American Society for the Defense
of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP)

 

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Foreword, Page xv – xvii.

INTRODUCTION

Today, Catolicismo publishes its hundredth issue.¹ To mark the event it wished to give this number a special note that might deepen the already profound communication of soul between it and its readers.

For this, nothing seemed more appropriate than the publication of an essay on the subject of Revolution and Counter-Revolution.

The selection of this subject is easy to explain. Catolicismo is a combative journal. As such, it must be judged principally in relation to the end toward which its combat strives. Now, whom, precisely, does it wish to combat? A reading of its pages may provide an insufficiently defined impression in this regard. One frequently finds therein refutations of communism, socialism, totalitarianism, liberalism, liturgicism, “Maritainism,” and various other “isms.” Nevertheless, one would not say that any one of these has been emphasized over the others to such an extent that Catolicismo could be defined by it alone. For example, it would be an exaggeration to affirm that Catolicismo is a specifically anti-Protestant or anti-socialist paper. One would say, then, that our journal has a plurality of ends. However, one perceives that, in the perspective in which it places itself, all of these aims have, as it were, a common denominator, and this is the objective our paper always has before it.

What is this common denominator? A doctrine? A force? A current of opinion? Clearly, an elucidation of this point would help explain the depths of the whole work of doctrinal formation that Catolicismo has been doing in the course of these one hundred months.

*          *          *

However, the benefit that can be derived from the study of Revolution and Counter-Revolution goes far beyond this limited objective.

To demonstrate this, we need but glance at the religious scene of our country. Statistically speaking, the situation of Catholics is excellent: According to the latest official data, we comprise 94 percent of the population. If all of us were the Catholics we should be, Brazil would now be one of the most admirable Catholic powers to have arisen in the course of the twenty centuries of the life of the Church.

Why, then, are we so far from this ideal? Can anyone truthfully say that the main cause of our present situation is spiritualism, Protestantism, atheism, or communism? No! It is something else, impalpable and subtle, and as penetrating as a powerful and fearful radiation. All feel its effects, but few know its name or nature.

As we write these words, our thoughts transcend the frontiers of Brazil, to our dear sister nations of Hispanic America, and thence to all Catholic nations. In each, this same evil exerts its undefined but overwhelming sway, producing symptoms of tragic grandeur. Consider this example among others. In a letter written in 1955 regarding the National Day of Thanksgiving, Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, substitute for the Vatican secretary of state, said to Carlos Carmelo Cardinal de Vasconcellos Motta of Sao Paulo: “Because of the religious agnosticism of the states,” there has been “a decline or almost loss of the sense of the Church in modern society.” Now what enemy struck this terrible blow against the Bride of Christ? What is the common cause of this and so many other concomitant and like evils? What shall we call it? What are the means by which it acts? What is the secret of its victory? How can we combat it successfully?

Obviously, it would be difficult to find a more timely subject.

*          *          *

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

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.

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.

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.

*          *          *

Naturally, a process so profound, vast, and prolonged cannot develop without encompassing every domain of human activity, such as culture, art, laws, customs, and institutions.

A detailed study of this process in all its areas of development is much beyond the scope of this essay.

Here — limiting ourselves to one vein of this vast matter — we attempt to sketch summarily the outlines of the immense avalanche that is the Revolution, to give it an adequate name, and to indicate very succinctly its profound causes, the agents promoting it, the essential elements of its doctrine, the respective importance of the various fields in which it acts, the vigor of its dynamism, and the mechanism of its expansion.

In a similar way, we then treat analogous points pertaining to the Counter-Revolution, and study some of the conditions for its victory.

Even so, in each of these themes, we had to restrict ourselves to explaining what in our view are presently the most useful elements for enlightening our readers and assisting them in the fight against the Revolution. We had to leave out many points of capital importance but of less pressing urgency.

This work, as we have said, is a simple ensemble of theses by which one may better know the spirit and program of Catolicismo. It would go beyond its natural proportions if it included a complete demonstration of each affirmation. We have limited ourselves to developing the minimum argumentation necessary for showing the relationship between the various theses and giving a panoramic view of a whole side of our doctrinal positions.

*          *          *

This essay may serve as a survey. What exactly do the readers of Catolicismo in Brazil and elsewhere (who are certainly among those most opposed to the Revolution) think about the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution? Although our propositions encompass only part of the subject, we hope they will lead each of our readers to ask himself this question and to send us his answer, which we would welcome with great interest.

 

_{1. This introduction was first published in the April 1959 issue of the Brazilian journal Catolicismo.}

^{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), Foreword, Pages 1-5.

 

Part I: The Revolution

Chapter I: The Crisis of Contemporary Man

The many crises shaking the world today – those of the State, family, economy, culture, and so on – are but multiple aspects of a single fundamental crisis whose field of action is man himself. In other words, these crises have their root in the most profound problems of the soul, from whence they spread to the whole personality of present-day man and all his activities.

 

Chapter II: The Crisis of Western and Christian Man

Above all, this is a crisis of Western and Christian man, that is, Europeans and their descendants, Canadians, Americans, Latin Americans, and Australians. We will study it especially as such. It also affects other peoples to the degree that Western influence has reached and taken root among them. In their case, the crisis is interwoven with problems peculiar to their respective cultures and civilizations and to the clash of these with the positive or negative elements of Western culture and civilization.

 

Chapter III: Characteristics of This Crisis

However profound the factors that diversify this crisis from country to country, it always has five major characteristics.

1. It is Universal

This crisis is universal. There is no people that is not affected by it to a greater or lesser degree.

2. It is One

This crisis is one. It is not a range of crises developing side by side, independently in each country, interrelated because of certain analogies of varying relevance.

When a fire breaks out in a forest, one cannot regard it as a thousand autonomous and parallel fires of a thousand trees in close proximity. The unity of the phenomenon of combustion acts on the living unity that is the forest. Moreover, the great force of expansion of the flames results from the heat in which the innumerable flames of the different trees intermingle and multiply. Indeed, everything helps to make the forest fire a single fact, totally encompassing the thousand partial fires, however different from one another in their accidents.

Western Christendom constituted a single whole that transcended the several Christian countries without absorbing them. A crisis occurred within this living unity, eventually affecting the whole through the combined and even fused heat of the ever more numerous local crises that across the centuries have never ceased to intertwine and augment one another. Consequently, Christendom, as a family of officially Catholic states, has long ceased to exist. The Western and Christian peoples are mere remnants of it. And now they are all agonizing under the action of this same evil.

3. It is Total

In any given country, this crisis develops in such a profound level of problems that it spreads or unfolds, by the very order of things, in all powers of the soul, all fields of culture, and, in the end, all realms of human action.

4. It is Dominant

Considered superficially, the events of our days seem a chaotic and inextricable tangle. From many points of view, they are indeed.

However, one can discern profoundly consistent and vigorous resultants of this conjunction of so many disorderly forces when considering them from the standpoint of the great crisis we are analyzing.

Indeed, under the impulse of these forces in delirium, the Western nations are being gradually driven toward a state of affairs which is taking the same form in all of them and is diametrically opposed to Christian civilization.

Thus, this crisis is like a queen whom all the forces of chaos serve as efficient and docile vassals.

5. It is Processive

This crisis is not a spectacular, isolated episode. It constitutes, on the contrary, a critical process already five centuries old. It is a long chain of causes and effects that, having originated at a certain moment with great intensity in the deepest recesses of the soul and the culture of Western man, has been producing successive convulsions since the fifteenth century. The words of Pius XII about a subtle and mysterious enemy of the Church can fittingly be applied to this process:

It is to be found everywhere and among everyone; it can be both violent and astute. In these last centuries, it has attempted to disintegrate the intellectual, moral, and social unity in the mysterious organism of Christ. It has sought nature without grace, reason without faith, freedom without authority, and, at times, authority without freedom. It is an “enemy” that has become more and more apparent with an absence of scruples that still surprises: Christ yes; the Church no! Afterwards: God yes; Christ no! Finally the impious shout: God is dead and, even, God never existed! And behold now the attempt to build the structure of the world on foundations which we do not hesitate to indicate as the main causes of the threat that hangs over humanity: economy without God, law without God, politics without God.[3]

This process should not be viewed as an altogether fortuitous sequence of causes and effects that has taken place unexpectedly. Already at its inception, this crisis was strong enough to carry out all its potentialities. It is still strong enough to cause, by means of supreme upheavals, the ultimate destructions that are its logical outcome.

Influenced and conditioned in different ways by all sorts of extrinsic factors (cultural, social, economic, ethnic, geographic, and others), it follows paths that are sinuous at times. It nonetheless never ceases to progress toward its tragic end.

A. The Decay of the Middle Ages

In the fourteenth century, a transformation of mentality began to take place in Christian Europe; in the course of the fifteenth century, it became ever more apparent. The thirst for earthly pleasures became a burning desire. Diversions became more and more frequent and sumptuous, increasingly engrossing men. In dress, manners, language, literature, and art, the growing yearning for a life filled with delights of fancy and the senses produced progressive manifestations of sensuality and softness.

Little by little, the seriousness and austerity of former times lost their value. The whole trend was toward gaiety, affability, and festiveness. Hearts began to shy away from the love of sacrifice, from true devotion to the Cross, and from the aspiration to sanctity and eternal life. Chivalry, formerly one of the highest expressions of Christian austerity, became amorous and sentimental. The literature of love invaded all countries. Excesses of luxury and the consequent eagerness for gain spread throughout all social classes.

Penetrating intellectual circles, this moral climate produced clear manifestations of pride, such as a taste for ostentatious and vain disputes, for inconsistent tricks of argument, and for fatuous exhibitions of learning. It praised old philosophical tendencies over which Scholasticism had triumphed. As the former zeal for the integrity of the Faith waned, these tendencies reappeared in new guises. The absolutism of legists, who adorned themselves with a conceited knowledge of Roman law, was favorably received by ambitious princes. And, all the while, in great and small alike, there was a fading of the will of yore to keep the royal power within its proper bounds as in the days of Saint Louis of France and Saint Ferdinand of Castile.

B. The Pseudo-Reformation and the Renaissance

This new state of soul contained a powerful although more or less unacknowledged desire for an order of things fundamentally different from that which had reached its heights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

An exaggerated and often delirious admiration for antiquity served as a means for the expression of this desire. In order to avoid direct confrontations with the old medieval tradition, humanism and the Renaissance frequently sought to relegate the Church, the supernatural, and the moral values of religion to a secondary plane. At the same time, the human type inspired by the pagan moralists was introduced by these movements as an ideal in Europe. This human type and the culture and civilization consistent with it were truly the precursors of the greedy, sensual, secularist, and pragmatic man of our days and of the materialistic culture and civilization into which we are sinking deeper and deeper. Efforts to effect a Christian Renaissance did not manage to crush in the germinal stage the factors that led to the gradual triumph of neopaganism.

In some parts of Europe, this neopaganism developed without leading to formal apostasy. It found significant resistance. Even when it became established within souls, it did not dare ask them – at least in the beginning – to formally break with the Faith.
However, in other countries, it openly attacked the Church. Pride and sensuality, whose satisfaction is the pleasure of pagan life, gave rise to Protestantism.

Pride begot the spirit of doubt, free examination, and naturalistic interpretation of Scripture. It produced insurrection against ecclesiastical authority, expressed in all sects by the denial of the monarchical character of the Universal Church, that is to say, by a revolt against the Papacy. Some of the more radical sects also denied what could be called the higher aristocracy of the Church, namely, the bishops, her princes. Others even denied the hierarchical character of the priesthood itself by reducing it to a mere delegation of the people, lauded as the only true holder of priestly power.

On the moral plane, the triumph of sensuality in Protestantism was affirmed by the suppression of ecclesiastical celibacy and by the introduction of divorce.”

C. The French Revolution

The profound action of humanism and the Renaissance among Catholics spread unceasingly throughout France in a growing chain of consequences.

Favored by the weakening of piety in the faithful caused by Jansenism and the other leavens sixteenth-century Protestantism had unfortunately left in the Most Christian Kingdom, this action gave rise in the eighteenth century to a nearly universal dissolution of customs, a frivolous and superficial way of considering things, and a deification of earthly life that paved the way for the gradual victory of irreligion.

Doubts about the Church, the denial of the divinity of Christ, deism, and incipient atheism marked the stages of this apostasy.

The French Revolution was the heir of Renaissance neopaganism and of Protestantism, with which it had a profound affinity. It carried out a work in every respect symmetrical to that of the Pseudo-Reformation. The Constitutional Church it attempted to set up before sinking into deism and atheism was an adaptation of the Church of France to the spirit of Protestantism. The political work of the French Revolution was but the transposition to the sphere of the State of the “reform” the more radical Protestant sects had adopted in the matter of ecclesiastical organization:

– the revolt against the King corresponding to the revolt against the Pope;

– the revolt of the common people against the nobles, to the revolt of the ecclesiastical “common people,” the faithful, against the “aristocracy” of the Church, the clergy;

– the affirmation of popular sovereignty, to the government of certain sects by the faithful in varying degree.

D. Communism

Some sects arising from Protestantism transposed their religious tendencies directly to the political field, thus preparing the way for the republican spirit. In the seventeenth century, Saint Francis de Sales warned the Duke of Savoy against these republican tendencies.[4] Other sects went even further, adopting principles that, if not communist in the full sense of the word today, were at least precommunist.

Out of the French Revolution came the communist movement of Babeuf. Later, the nineteenth-century schools of utopian communism and the so-called scientific communism of Marx burst forth from the increasingly ardent spirit of the Revolution.

And what could be more logical? The normal fruit of deism is atheism. Sensuality, revolting against the fragile obstacles of divorce, tends of itself toward free love. Pride, enemy of all superiority, finally had to attack the last inequality, that of wealth.

Drunk with dreams of a one-world republic, of the suppression of all ecclesiastical or civil authority, of the abolition of any Church, and of the abolition of the State itself after a transitional dictatorship of the workers, the revolutionary process now brings us the twentieth-century neobarbarian, its most recent and extreme product.

E. Monarchy, Republic, and Religion

To avoid any misunderstanding, it is necessary to emphasize that this exposition does not contain the assertion that the republic is necessarily a revolutionary regime. When speaking of the various forms of government, Leo XIII made it quite clear that “each of them is good, as long as it moves honestly toward its end, namely, the common good, for which social authority is constituted.”[5]

We do label as revolutionary the hostility professed against monarchy and aristocracy on the principle that they are essentially incompatible with human dignity and the normal order of things. This error was condemned by Saint Pius X in the apostolic letter Notre charge apostolique, of August 25, 1910. In this letter, the great and holy Pontiff censures the thesis of Le Sillon, that “only democracy will inaugurate the reign of perfect justice,” and he says: “Is this not an injury to the other forms of government, which are thus reduced to the category of impotent governments, acceptable only for lack of something better?”[6]

If one fails to consider this error, which is deeply rooted in the process under study, one cannot completely explain how it is that monarchy, classified by Pope Pius VI as the best form of government in thesis (“praestantioris monorchici regiminis forma” [7]), has been the object in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of a hostile worldwide movement that has overthrown the most venerable thrones and dynasties. From our perspective, the mass production of republics all over the world is a typical fruit of the Revolution and a capital aspect of it.

A person cannot be termed a revolutionary for preferring, in view of concrete and local reasons, that his country be a democracy instead of an aristocracy or a monarchy, provided the rights of legitimate authority be respected. But, yes, he can be termed a revolutionary if, led by the Revolution’s egalitarian spirit, he hates monarchy or aristocracy in principle and classifies them as essentially unjust or inhuman.

From this antimonarchical and antiaristocratic hatred are born the demagogic democracies, which combat tradition, persecute the elites, degrade the general tone of life, and create an ambience of vulgarity that constitutes, as it were, the dominant note of the culture and civilization—supposing the concepts of civilization and culture can be realized in such conditions.

How different from this revolutionary democracy is the democracy described by Pius XII:

“History bears witness to the fact that, wherever true democracy reigns, the life of the people is as it were permeated with sound traditions, which it is illicit to destroy. The primary representatives of these traditions are first of all the leading classes, that is, the groups of men and women or the associations that set the tone, as we say, for the village or the city, for the region or the entire country. Whence the existence and influence, among all civilized peoples, of aristocratic institutions, aristocratic in the highest sense of the word, like certain academies of widespread and well-deserved fame. And the nobility is also in that number.” [8]

As can be seen, the spirit of revolutionary democracy is quite different from the spirit that must animate a democracy according to the doctrine of the Church.

F. Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and Dictatorship

These considerations on the position of the Revolution and of Catholic thought concerning forms of government may lead some readers to inquire whether dictatorship is a revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary factor.

To provide a clear answer to this question—to which many confused and even tendentious replies have been given—it is necessary to make a distinction between certain elements indiscriminately linked in the idea of dictatorship as public opinion conceives of it. Mistaking dictatorship in thesis for what it has been in practice in [the 20^th] century, the public sees dictatorship as a state of affairs in which a leader endowed with unlimited powers governs a country. For its good, say some. For its harm, say others. But in either case, such a state of affairs is still a dictatorship.

Now, this concept involves two distinct elements:

—the omnipotence of the State;

—the concentration of state power in the hands of a single person.

The public mind seems to focus on the second element. Nevertheless, the first is the basic element, at least if we see dictatorship as a state of affairs in which the public authority, having suspended the juridical order, disposes of all rights at its good pleasure. It is entirely evident that a dictatorship may be exercised by a king. (A royal dictatorship, that is, the suspension of the whole juridical order and the unrestricted exercise of public power by the king, is not to be confused with the Ancien Regime, in which these guarantees existed to a considerable degree, nor, much less, with the organic medieval monarchy.) It is also entirely evident that a dictatorship may be exercised by a popular chief, a hereditary aristocracy, a clan of bankers, or even by the masses.

In itself, a dictatorship exercised by a chief or a group of persons is neither revolutionary nor counter-revolutionary. It will be either one or the other depending on the circumstances that gave rise to it and the work it does. This is the case whether it is in the hands of one man or in the hands of a group.

There are circumstances that demand, for the sake of the salus populi, a suspension of individual rights and a greater exercise of public power. A dictatorship, therefore, can be legitimate in certain cases.

A counter-revolutionary dictatorship—a dictatorship completely oriented by the desire for order—must have three essential requisites:

• It must suspend rights to protect order, not to subvert it. By order we do not mean mere material tranquility, but the disposition of things according to their end and in accordance with the respective scale of values. This is, then, a suspension of rights that is more apparent than real, the sacrifice of juridical guarantees that evil elements had abused to the detriment of order itself and of the common good. This sacrifice is entirely directed toward the protection of the true rights of the good.

• By definition, this suspension is temporary. It must prepare circumstances for a return to order and normality as soon as possible. A dictatorship, to the degree it is good, proceeds to put an end to its very reason for being. The intervention of public authority in the various sectors of the national life must be undertaken in such a way that, as soon as possible, each sector may live with the necessary autonomy. Thus, each family should be allowed to do everything it is capable of doing by its nature, being supported by higher social groups only in a subsidiary way in what is beyond its sphere of action. These groups, in turn, should only receive the help of their municipality in what exceeds their normal capacity, and so on up the line in the relations between the municipality and the region or between the region and the country.

• The essential end of a legitimate dictatorship nowadays must be the Counter-Revolution. This does not mean a dictatorship is normally necessary for the defeat of the Revolution. But, in certain circumstances, it may be.

In contrast, a revolutionary dictatorship aims to perpetuate itself. It violates authentic rights and penetrates all spheres of society to destroy them. It carries out this destruction by sundering family life, harming the genuine elites, subverting the social hierarchy, fomenting utopian ideas and disorderly ambitions in the multitudes, extinguishing the real life of the social groups, and subjecting everything to the State. In short, it favors the work of the Revolution. A typical example of such a dictatorship was Hitlerism.

For this reason, a revolutionary dictatorship is fundamentally anti-Catholic. In fact, in a truly Catholic ambience, there can be no climate for such a situation.

This is not to say that a revolutionary dictatorship in one or another country has not sought to favor the Church. But this is merely a question of a political attitude that is transformed into open or veiled persecution as soon as the ecclesiastical authority begins to hinder the pace of the Revolution.

3 Pius XII, allocution to the Union of Men of the Italian Catholic Action on October 12, 1952, Discorsi e radiomessagi di Sua Santita Pio XII (Vatican: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1953), vo. 14, p. 359.
4 See Sainte-Beuve, Etudes de lundis – XVIIème siècle – Saint François de Sales (Paris: Librairie Garnier, 1928), p. 364.
5 Leo XIII, encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes, February 16, 1892, Bonne Presse, Paris, vol. 3, p. 166.
6 Saint Pius X, Notre charge apostolique, Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 2, p. 618.
7 Pius VI, allocution to the Consistory of June 17, 1793, Les Enseignements Pontificaux – La Paix Interieure de Nations, by the monks of Solesmes (Paris: Desclee & Cie), p. 8.
8 Pius XII, Allocution to the Roman Patriciate and Nobility, January 16, 1946, Discorsi e Radiomessagi di Sua Santità Pio XII, vol. 7, p. 340.

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, PA: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Part I, Ch. 1, Ch. 2, Ch. 3 A-F, pps. 7-23.