Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

"Folha de S. Paulo", January 1th 1979 (extracts)

Madonna dei Monti (Rome)

The desacralizing laicism that dominates our society is not limited to disfiguring the commemorations of the Birth of Our Lord. It persecutes Christmas even down to the august echoes which prolong it in the feasts that follow: New Year, Epiphany...

In religious terms, New Years is the Feast of the Circumcision commemorating the drops of the infinitely precious blood Our Lord shed for men in his infancy presaging the august sacrifice which His infancy and thus already makes one think of the august Sacrifice which would redeem them from sin, wrench them from eternal death, and open for them the way of heaven.

But the brackish commemoration of a universal and utterly laicist fraternization of peoples has been superimposed on this religious feast of the child God. This fraternization, irremediably empty like everything that is laicist, is the object of the cynical laughter from the iron and bamboo walls that divide peoples, of the terrorism that fills them with dread, of the risk of atomic destruction that weighs upon them like a leaden cloud, and of the saraband of ideas and incompatible and irreconcilable interests, ever growing in antagonism and hate.

In a word, when the sun sets the vicious animals leave their lairs and wander about the jungle. Laicism presents Jesus Christ to the world as a sun just setting. Why should there be any surprise at the multiplication and diffusion of everything that is devilish in the lairs of dechristianizcd hearts, in the deranged cities and in the wilderness where crime and vice lurk, multiplying at will?

"But," someone will say, "why bring all this to mind in this happy setting? Why this whimpering at a time when men are seeking laughter and merrymaking?"

It is a protest. And if this protest sounds like whimpering to ears deadened by modern cacophony, the defect is not in the protest. The defect is in him who knows how to perceive only what it is not: whimpering.

Because whimpering is pusillanimous, and rings of defeat and capitulation. But a protest inspired by the love of Christ, the conquering King, and Mary "ut castrorum acies ordinata" (like an army in battle array) hurls itself fearlessly into the midst of incomprehension. This protest is a cry of reparation, a proclamation of inconformity. More than that, it is a foretelling of victory.