About Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira (December 13, 1908 – October 3, 1995) was a Brazilian Catholic intellectual, writer, university professor, and political activist. A leading figure of twentieth-century traditionalist Catholicism in Latin America, he is best known as the founder of the Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP) and as the author of Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1959). Born in São Paulo into a family with roots in the Pernambucan and Paulista landed aristocracy, Corrêa de Oliveira was educated by the Jesuits and graduated in law from the University of São Paulo. Active in the Marian Congregations and the Catholic Electoral League, in 1933 he was elected to Brazil's Constituent Assembly at the age of 24, the youngest member of that body. He later held the chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and served as the first president of the São Paulo Archdiocesan Board of Catholic Action, a position he lost in 1944 after publishing In Defense of Catholic Action (1943), which attacked the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. His thought combined Thomism with a counter-revolutionary philosophy of history that interpreted the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, and twentieth-century Communism as three successive stages of a single process aimed at the destruction of Christian civilization. Through the journal Catolicismo and a long-running column in Folha de S.Paulo, he became one of Brazil's most prominent conservative voices, opposing agrarian reform, liberation theology, and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which he later described as "one of the greatest calamities, if not the greatest, in the history of the Church." Scholars have variously characterized his positions as ultramontanist, integralist, or fundamentalist, and have examined the TFP's role in the conservative mobilization preceding Brazil's 1964 military coup; articles he published in the early 1930s contained antisemitic views that have been examined by historians of Brazilian Catholic thought. After his death the TFP fractured into competing successor organizations, principally the Heralds of the Gospel and the Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira Institute (IPCO), and his writings continue to influence transnational Catholic conservative network.
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