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Refinement without
Weakness,
Strength without Brutality
By Professor Plinio Corrêa de
Oliveira
Public opinion in the Romantic era was
attracted by refined, subtle, and fragile souls. We would
say exaggeratedly fragile, if fragility was not already
in itself a defect and an exaggeration. In our days, when
the struggle for survival of body and soul requires ceaseless
effort, people’s admiration turns more frequently to powerful,
strong, energetic and successful souls. And since everything
human is subject to exaggeration, we are often inclined
to glorify the physical strength of boxers and athletes
or the almost hypnotic force of certain dictators as absolute
and supreme values.
In this, as in everything else, a wholesome
balance is required. And the Catholic Church, the fountain
of all virtue, is the mistress of this equilibrium.
But strength and delicacy of soul are not
incompatible as long as each is rightly understood. A person
can be at the same time very refined without weakness and
extremely strong without brutality.
Certainly there are few pious Catholics
who have not read The Soul of the Apostolate, by
Abbot Jean-Baptiste Chautard, the famous Trappist who lived
in Brazil for some time in a vain attempt to found a monastery
of his order in the State of São Paulo. Reading the admirable
pages of that book calls to mind the unction found in
The Imitation of Christ and shows the treasures of
refinement of the abbot’s great soul.
Nevertheless, Dom Chautard was also a
great fighter. Though he was a contemplative by vocation,
Divine Providence required him to face many struggles. He
successfully confronted Clemenceau, the celebrated anti-clerical
prime minister of France who went down in history with the
nickname ‘The Tiger’. Clemenceau personified, as it were,
all the courage and capacity of resistance of the French
people during the First World War.
Dom Chautard impressed Clemenceau so much
that he respected him until the end of his days. Here we
see the strength of the man in his powerful personality,
imbued with all the calm of a contemplative, the resolution
of an iron will and the majesty of a robust and profound
spirit entirely penetrated with the things of God. His gaze
synthesizes, as it were, all these qualities. That noble
and dominating gaze worked wonders. During a trip to the
Orient, he came across a lion in a cage, looked at the wild
beast attentively and hypnotized him.
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All those who lived with the great Bishop,
Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira, acclaimed his extraordinarily
gentile manners and his great delicacy of soul. During his
long struggle with Masonic-influenced authorities, Dom Vital
revealed a firmness that made him one of the greatest bishops
the Church has ever had. His wide and noble forehead was
vivified, as it were, by the breath of grand ideas, and
by his vigorous and absolutely symmetrical eyebrows and
likewise impressively well-designed and clear eyes. His
gaze was calm, strong and profound, seeing everything from
afar and accustomed to considering things in their highest,
most transcendent, and therefore most real aspects. The
line of his nose displayed indisputable frankness; he had
a thick and manly beard and an upright bearing. Everything
in Bishop Vital indicates a shepherd who ardently loves
every one of his sheep, and for that very reason is capable
of driving any wild beast from the flock. Dom Chautard was
an outstanding Trappist and a model of the contemplative
life, while Bishop Vital was a distinguished Capuchin and
a model of the active life. Both of them were masterpieces
of balance between strength and refinement; and they demonstrate
well how Faith can vivify man with invincible energies in
this century of struggle at every moment and in every aspect
of life.
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