The
True Devotion Triology I
In 1980, Prof. Plinio Corrêa
de Oliveira wrote three articles explaining the timeliness
of St. Louis de Montfort's "slavery of love"
to Jesus Christ through Mary. Indeed, nothing could be
so contrary to the spirit of our age, and yet, nothing
can truly provide such a complete solution.
To You: Dear Atheist
by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Dear? This adjective may make readers
wonder. After all, they have seen me, through my articles
and other means, fight atheism for decades, especially the
most actively imperialistic form it has assumed in the course
of history, that is, Marxist atheism. How, then, can one
justify the adjective “dear?” The explanation
is this:
God wills the salvation of all men:
of the good, so that they may receive the reward of their
merits in Heaven; of the bad so that, touched by grace,
they may amend and attain Heaven. Therefore, from different
standpoints and for different reasons, both the former and
the latter are dear to God. Now since they are dear to God,
how could they not be so to a Catholic? Yes, dear even when
to defend the Church and Christendom, a Catholic fights
them. So for example, at the very moment that a crusader
was fiercely fighting a Mohammedan during the reconquest
of the Holy Sepulcher, he could have addressed the Mohammedan
as “dear brother.”
The expression “dear atheist”
is therefore valid and includes a range of different nuances;
for there are nuances in atheism. Naturally, a specific
sense of the word “dear” applies according to
the nuance. Thus, there are atheists who rejoice to such
an extent over their conviction that “God does not
exist” that if some evident fact such as a spectacular
miracle should convince them of the contrary, they might
easily come to hate God and even to kill Him, if it were
possible.
Other atheists are so mired in the
things of the earth that their atheism consists not in denying
the existence of God, but rather in being completely unconcerned
about the matter. If the distinction is permissible, they
are not “atheists” in the most radical sense of
the word, but rather “a-theists” that is, secularlists.
God is not part of their conception of life and the world.
Were it proven to them that God exists, they would see Him
as being with whom or without whom the world would go on
just as it does. Their reaction would be to totally and
perpetually banish Him from earthly affairs.
There is still a third kind of atheist
who, crushed by the labors and disappointments of life,
and seeing clearly, by bitter personal experience, that
the things of this world are no more than “vanity and
vexation of spirit” (Eccl. 1, 14), desires that God
existed. But hobbled by the sophistries of atheism, to which
they had formerly opened their souls, and tied by rationalistic
mental habits to which they had attached their minds, they
are now groping in the darkness unable to find the God whom
they once rejected. When I meditate on that apostrophe of
Jesus Christ, “Come to Me all you that labor, and are
burdened, and I will refresh you” (Matt., 11, 28),
I think especially of this kind of atheist and feel especially
inclined to call them “dear atheists.”
This explains the kinds of atheists
to whom these reflections are particularly directed. Nevertheless,
it is not only them that I have in mind, but many other
readers who are much more dear to me: some brothers in the
Catholic Faith, members, as I am, of the Mystical Body of
Jesus Christ. Having read a reference I made to the spirituality
of St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, they wanted me
to say something more about the matter.
Now I speak to the especially dear
atheists, hoping to touch them to the depth of their souls,
in the same text in which I speak to my very dear brothers
in the Faith.
Imagine yourself, dear atheist, in
one of those intervals of the daily life of yore in whose
calm the agreeable and profound impressions — which
the labor of the day, charged with the dust of triviality
and the sweat of effort, had smothered in the subconscious
— would rise to the surface of the spirit. Those were
the ample moments of leisure in which the yearnings for
a smiling past, the enchantments and hopes of a harsh but
luminous present, and the so-often treacherous fantasies
would make an agreeable stereoscope for relaxing the soul,
“put in peace…in that gay and blind deceit that
fortune does not permit to long endure” (Camões,
Lusiadas, Canto III, verse 120).
In today's scanty moments of leisure,
on the contrary, it is the neurotic tumult of disappointments,
worries, wild ambitions and exacerbated weariness that rise
to the surface. And over this tumult hovers an overwhelming,
leaden, and obscure question: “What am I living for?”
The True Devotion Trilogy II
The
True Devotion Trilogy III
First published in the Folha
de São Paulo
