Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

The Doctrine We Refute

In the Encyclical in which he condemned the Catholic youth association called Le Sillon, the Holy Father Pius X, after exposing the egalitarian and liberal nature of the group’s doctrines, showed the repercussions of that tendency in the various spheres of its activity. When he dealt with the methods of intellectual formation Le Sillon employed to train its members, Pius X showed how their leveling drive was inspired in the doctrine of universal suffrage:

Indeed, the Sillon has no hierarchy. The governing elite has emerged from the rank and file by selection, that is, by imposing itself through its moral authority and its virtues. People join it freely, and freely they may leave it. Studies are carried out without a master, at the very most, with an adviser. The study groups are really intellectual pools in which each member is at once both master and student. The most complete fellowship prevails amongst its members, and draws their souls into close communion: hence the common soul of the Sillon. It has been called a "friendship". Even the priest, on entering, lowers the eminent dignity of his priesthood and, by a strange reversal of roles, becomes a student, placing himself on a level with his young friends, and is no more than a comrade. (1)

Reading this text attentively, we can see that the Holy Father condemns in that teaching method, the following errors:

1. The abolition of the function of professor—seen as being unegalitarian.

2. As a result, teaching loses its traditional character, becoming a search for truths whose results are approved not by the professor with his authority and prestige but in a democratic fashion, by the vote and consensus of self-teaching students. In other words, it is a radical pedagogic anarchy.

In this matter, we should distinguish two errors: The spirit of independence, which suggested that subversion of methods, and the radical inadequacy of those methods for a solid and vigorous intellectual formation.

The deepest cause of the errors we have been analyzing is a strong substratum of liberalism, easily noticed through all we have said. Consciously or not, those errors always result in a decrease of authority. The elements dominated by such a mentality could do nothing but fall, more or less completely, in the error of Le Sillon. This is why we have very often heard the statement that classes, courses, etc., are obsolete methods of moral and intellectual formation, which Catholic Action should neither use frequently nor turn into its main method of instruction. Instead, week-long seminars with such lectures should or could be held only once or twice a year. Study workshops are the youthful, interesting, democratic and attractive replacements of the old, rancid, stern, monotonous and anti-egalitarian methods of teaching.

What are the study workshops often held in certain sectors of Catholic Action actually like? An enumeration here is also fitting:

1. The audience should be normally limited to no more than a dozen persons; one of them, called leader or adviser, orients the work. As much as possible, this leader or adviser should have the same age and intellectual level as the others;

2. The leader should exclude carefully, in his way of acting, talking and orienting the work, any manifestation that would place him in the position of a professor or person exercising a function that implies superiority or preeminence. Just like the chief of a Communist cell, he should be the most accessible, approachable and unpretentious "comrade" of all present. The leader must fade in such a way as to minimize any suspicion that it is he who aptly, though disguisedly, leads the course of ideas;

3. The workshop can deal indistinctly with doctrinal matters, even high level ones, and the most complex and detailed practical matters. Any topics can be debated, from issues in sight of which a most serious theologian would stagger, to others whose complexity would make the most stalwart moralist hesitate;

4. Any well prepared lesson normally contains a clear definition of the terms of the problem to be studied; an enumeration of the principles applicable to the matter; an exposition of the different opinions that have been formulated on the subject; its critique; and a presentation of the professor's opinion and its foundation. On the contrary, in the workshop the leader must carefully hide his personal opinion and gradually bring out the various aspects of the subject by asking questions to those present, who then air the issues in succession. For this purpose the leader must never personally join the debate by arguing with participants, but rather make them argue among themselves;

5. After a while, if the leader is skillful he will have succeeded in leading souls to the possession of the truth in an imperceptible way; the more capable the leader, the more spontaneous the debates will appear to be. Some people give the workshops a strong anti-intellectual note because they believe conclusions arise less from a chain of reasoning than from the vital spontaneity coming from the "community" and the various "presences" that spring from it;

6. The result of the workshop is supposed to be identical to that of a lesson, since it allegedly gave its participants the knowledge of truth, but in a livelier, more interesting and more convincing way. In a word, they acquired a vital knowledge, rather than the logical one formerly imparted by the old methods.

7. Each sector of Catholic Action must have a workshop for leaders, chaired preferably by a person of the central direction of Catholic Action. For their part, the latter repeat the workshops in each parish of the city and of the diocese.

What Is Good and What Is Bad about It

As in the doctrines we have been refuting, we find here some truths, some utopias, and many errors:

1. It is true, unfortunately, that lessons today very often have an afflictive barrenness. The language of the professor is made of terms with which the student is not completely familiar. The issues discussed are woefully obsolete; and when debating them, the professor shows a radical incapacity to understand present-day matters. The exposition is made without any concern to use the thousand existing resources to make it smoother and easier for the students to pay attention. Worse, a large number of students are superficial and merely grade-oriented, dislike any intellectual effort no matter how small it might be, and finally lack desire to know the truth. All this concurs to place them on a much lower level than the one normally necessary to understand an exposition by the professor.

2. There is no question these drawbacks are quite lamentable and we should do our best to remedy them. However, this does not invalidate in any way the great truth that a class—the explanation by a professor in front of an audience whose main function is to listen and understand—is and will always be the normal method of teaching. We do not want to discuss pedagogic issues here. So we will limit ourselves to recalling that even among the boldest defenders of the new school, very few would go as far as some exclusivists who believe workshops can dispense with any class and suffice in themselves to provide all or nearly all intellectual formation in religious matters. All the censures formulated against the new school by the Holy Father Pius XI in the Encyclical Divini Illius Magister apply fully to these exclusivists;

3. Were we to understand otherwise and believe that the traditional method of teaching by a professor is bankrupt, we would be led to think that Our Lord Jesus Christ endowed His Church with very poor resources when He instituted preaching as the method par excellence of her official teaching.

The famous maieutic of Socrates, an undoubtedly ingenious and fruitful process, does not serve as argument here, as it required students already endowed with high intellectual competence and a genuine Socrates to apply it. In the annals of teaching, maieutic remained an exception and no one would apply it as a normal and prevalent method of teaching even among philosophers of the stature of Aristotle or Saint Thomas. This is an evident proof that only someone with a very special and rare capability can use this method successfully;

4. Here we are touching one of the greatest errors committed by those who favor eliminating lessons as a teaching method. Any good teaching should not only provide the student with the possession of truth but also train him to make intellectual effort and accustom his intellect to the wide panorama of long-ranging doctrinal expositions and the vast systems of interconnected ideas that form imposing and fecund ideological structures. Now then, while a well-given class yields this fruit to a diligent and capable student, the study workshop, on the contrary, by its fragmentary aspect, has to normally represent chaos. Indeed, anyone who figures that a normal leader can conduct a debate within the limits already presented has renounced common sense. The technique analyzed here supposes that the leader knows how to insinuate the answers in such a way that the truth, so to speak, is born spontaneously from the debates. The most accomplished diplomats would at times find it difficult to orient in this way the digressions of a group of ten people lost in a maze of vast, interrelated doctrinal questions every one of which leads to yet a thousand more. Let us not nurture the illusion that workshop leaders have that capability, and even less that they would exist in sufficient numbers to serve our innumerable parishes.

For this very reason, workshops have given rise to countless equivocations and errors:

5. As conceived, the workshop method accustoms souls to debate the most varied problems without the necessary foundation and thereby deforms their intellect, turning pride into a habit. Pride generates rashness, which tempts people to set out to accomplish things beyond their strength. Minds thus accustomed to opine in matters they recognize more or less clearly as beyond their capacity, are proud intellects; obviously, therefore, workshops can be real schools of pride. "Altiora te ne quaesieris," (2) says Saint Thomas to those who want to acquire the treasure of science.

6. To these intrinsic drawbacks, let us add others that affect workshops only in a merely circumstantial way and are important only as long as a lack of strong measures allows them to exist.

In practice, the task of preparing workshops has been often entrusted to persons still in adolescence, or possessing a culture such that they are totally inept for the job. We know the concrete case of a workshop woman leader who suddenly asked, during the session, whether cats have a soul. As this was a really impenetrably mystery for her, she felt confused and the workshop ended with the laughter of her friends—who were as little acquainted with the solution as she was. Now if we intend, as is unfortunately the case, hastily to disseminate workshops throughout Brazil’s huge territory, what kind of leaders can we expect?

Furthermore, how can we expect our learned and zealous clergy to attend countless workshops by small groups of people inside the parish? And how can we expect orthodoxy to be kept in all the innumerable workshops without the presence of a priest?

From all that has been said we can deduce that the design to establish workshops as the exclusive or main process for religious instruction and general orientation of Catholic Action members is unacceptable from the didactic standpoint and can only stem from prejudice and tendencies that must not find harbor in a well-formed Catholic.

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Should Catholic Action Use Workshops?

While we do not praise workshops done with the spirit and tendencies mentioned above, this does not mean that we plan or propose their complete elimination. On the contrary, we understand that well employed, they can be very useful to Catholic Action.

Workshops would function as complementary elements and would be very useful as long as the intent to make them the primordial means of teaching is renounced entirely and they are placed in their normal and traditional function.

The best of classes can never solve the multiple problems and objections stirred up in the students, nor will it be able to take care of a particular interest that each student might take in this or that aspect of the subject treated. For this reason, professor-student contacts outside the classroom always yield invaluable teaching results. Aiming to make such contacts more methodical and effective, several universities began to hold meetings between students and professors, named “seminars.” They are designed to foster fruitful rapport between masters and disciples in an atmosphere of intimacy.

To make it even more advantageous, it was established that students should take a very active part in such meetings, producing specialized studies, asking questions and discussing among themselves under the vigilant authority of the professor or his assistant. In its structure this organization is only a couple of steps away from workshops: it shares with them all the flexibility and all the advantages springing from student initiatives, free discussion, etc. On the other hand, workshops differ from "seminars" in an essential point: "Seminar" sessions are based on a previous preparation of the classes and guaranteed by the presence of a professor who participates by exercising his teaching function, whereas workshops lack any preparation whatsoever on the part of its members, except for the leader, and are not guaranteed by the presence of any authority. The "seminar" is held to complete the work of the professor. The workshop is done to eliminate it.

The question of terminology obviously has a secondary importance here. As long as workshops become true "seminars" it does not matter what name they are given. In the meantime, what is capital is that workshops relinquish their reliance on science born of spontaneous generation and start to develop by means of classes and courses, which should always be the main instruments of formation in Catholic Action.

We do not consider indispensable that a workshop always be led by a priest. But if a lay person is given this task, he should have a degree of formation and instruction much greater than that of a simple Catechism teacher. As a rule, the latter only deals with children, whereas a workshop leader generally deals with adolescents and adults. Thus, Catholic Action would be very wise to require special studies for such leaders, proportional to the intellectual demands of the ambience in which they work, and have them tested through examinations.

We will finish this chapter with a final consideration, though one of detail.

In preceding chapters we showed the concrete consequences of the doctrine that the ecclesiastical assistant is a mere doctrinal censor in the meetings of Catholic Action boards of directors. In practice, all effective power escapes from his hands and he is left only with a thankless veto function. True, he would still keep the appreciable task of forming members of Catholic Action. However, if all formation must be done in workshops, which normally should have no more than ten members, one can figure that in a 200-member group of Catholic Action the assistant would need to hold twenty meetings per week if he wanted to personally form all the members. Obviously, he would not have enough time and would be forced to form a small group that would in turn form the others. What a curious situation! In the final analysis, the assistant would lose any direct action over the bulk of the members, while the function of forming would remain in the hands of the same people who already claimed that of governing.  Once again there is a clear analogy between the situation being sought for the ecclesiastical assistant and that of priests in the old confraternities of the time of Bishop Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira and Bishop Antonio de Macedo Costa.

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To close, we find it useful to summarize some of the principles on workshops that we have just enumerated:

1. Workshops cannot suffice to provide an intellectual and moral formation to members and interns of Catholic Action. Such formation must be imparted in lessons, conferences or lectures, by the ecclesiastical assistant or an authorized professor;

2. Nevertheless, as a complement of the work of the professor, and always under his direction, workshops can produce precious results.

3. In these workshops, the professor will retain his full authority. He will be not merely a president in charge of moderating overheated arguments: he will also be the authority who teaches and decides.

4. In workshops the professor should not hide his prerogatives in any way, but know how to use them with the necessary kindness to put participants at ease and let them freely pose the questions, doubts or objections they may wish to make;

5. The matters to be dealt with in the workshop should remain within a general order so as to prevent them from losing their connection to the lesson or course to which they should relate.

Notes:

1) St. Pius X, Apostolic Letter Notre Charge Apostolique, Aug. 25, 1910. (Trans.: See Appendix II for the full text of this Apostolic Letter. French original at http://membres.lycos.fr/lesbonstextes/stpxnotrechargeapostolique.htm; English versions at The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Oct. 1910, vol. XXXV, no. 140, pp. 693-711; www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=5456 ;  www.the-pope.com/sillon.html ; TFP referred to the French original in editing the various English versions.)

2) “Don’t look for things that are too high for you.”

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