Foreward
Introduction
PART I
THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER 1The Crisis of Contemporary Man
CHAPTER 2
The Crisis of Western and Christian Man
CHAPTER 3
Characteristics of This Crisis
CHAPTER 4
The Metamorphoses of
the Revolutionary Process
Chapter 5
The Three Depths of the Revolution:
In the Tendencies,in the Ideas, and in the Facts
Chapter 6
The March of the Revolution
Chapter 7
The Essence of the Revolution
Chapter 8
The Intelligence, the Will, and the Sensibility in the Determination
of Human Acts
Chapter 9
The "Semi-Counterrevolutionary" Is also a Son of the Revolution
Chapter 10
Culture, Arts, and Ambiences in the Revolution
Chapter 11
The Revolution on Sin and Redemption, and the Revolutionary Utopia
Chapter 12
The Pacifist and Antimilitarist Character of the Revolution
PART II
THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Chapter 1The Counter-Revolution Is a Reaction
Chapter 2
Reaction and Historical Immobility
Chapter 3
The Counter-Revolution and the Craving After Novelties
Chapter 4
What Is a Counter-Revolutionary?
Chapter 5
The Counter-Revolution's Tactics
Chapter 6
The Counter-Revolution's
Means of Action
Chapter 7
Obstacles to the Counter-Revolution
Chapter 8
The Processive Character of the Counter-Revolution, and the Counter-Revolutionary "Shock"
Chapter 9
The Driving Force of the
Counter-Revolution
Chapter 10
The Counter-Revolution, Sin, and the Redemption
Chapter 11
The Counter-Revolution and Temporal Society
Chapter 12
The Church and the Counter-Revolution
PART III
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION TWENTY YEARS AFTER
Chapter 1The Revolution: A Process in Continual Transformation
Chapter 2
The Apogee and Crisis of the Third Revolution
Chapter 3
The Aborning Fourth Revolution
Conclusion
Postface
Revolution and Counter-Revolution
PART III
Revolution and Counter-Revolution - Twenty Years After
Revolution and Counter-Revolution - Twenty Years After
Chapter II: The Apogee and Crisis of the Third Revolution
1. The Apogee Of The Third Revolution
As we have seen,69 three great revolutions constituted the chief stages of the process to gradually demolish the Church and Christian civilization: in the sixteenth century, humanism, the Renaissance, and Protestantism (First Revolution); in the eighteenth century, the French Revolution (Second Revolution); and in the second decade of this century, Communism (Third Revolution).
These three revolutions can only be understood as parts of an immense whole that is the Revolution.
Since the Revolution is a process, it is obvious that, from 1917 to the present, the Third Revolution has continued its course. It is now at a true apogee.
When we consider the territories and populations subject to communist regimes, we see that the Third Revolution holds sway over a world empire without precedent in history. This empire is a continuous cause of insecurity and disunion among the greatest noncommunist nations. Moreover, the leaders of the Third Revolution control the strings that move, throughout the noncommunist world, the openly communist parties and the immense network of cryptocommunists, paracommunists, and useful idiots infiltrated not only into the noncommunist, socialist, and other parties, but also into the churches,70 professional and cultural associations, banks, the press, television, radio, the movie industry, and the like. And as if this were not enough, the Third Revolution applies with devastating efficacy - as we shall subsequently explain - the tactics of psychological conquest. With these tactics, communism is succeeding in reducing immense segments of the noncommunist Western public opinion to a foolish apathy. Such tactics enable the Third Revolution to expect, in this terrain, yet more remarkable successes that are even more disconcerting to observers who analyze events from outside the Third Revolution.
The international dimensions of the Third Revolution´s apogee was already notorious, as the text notes. With the passing of time, the general picture of this apogee became even clearer, whether on account of the geographical and populational expansion of communist domination, the worldwide diffusion of Red propaganda and the weight of the communist parties in the Western world, or the penetration of communist tendencies into national cultures.
These factors - heightened by a global panic of the atomic threat that Soviet aggressiveness posed to all continents - led to a policy of almost universal softness and capitulation in relation to Moscow: the German and Vatican Ostpolitiken, the sweeping wind of unconditional pacifism, the proliferation of political slogans and formulas that prepared so many bourgeois to view the triumph of communism as inevitable in the near future.
Have we not all lived under the psychological pressure of this leftist optimism, which was enigmatic as a sphinx for the indolent centrists and threatening as a leviathan for those - like the TFPs and followers of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in so many countries - who well discerned the "apocalypse" to which this was leading?
How few then were those who perceived that this leviathan was afflicted by a worsening crisis it could not overcome since it was an inevitable fruit of Marxist utopias!
This crisis now seems to have disintegrated the leviathan. But, as will be seen further on, this disintegration has spread an even more deadly climate of crisis throughout the world
The inertia -when not the overt and substantial collaboration - of so many "democratic" governments and crafty private economic powers of the West in face of communism (already so powerful) paints a dreadful global panorama.
Under these conditions, should the course of the revolutionary process continue as it has heretofore, it is humanly inevitable that the general triumph of the Third Revolution will ultimately impose itself on the whole world. How soon? Many would be alarmed if; as a mere hypothesis, we were to suggest twenty years. To them, this period would seem surprisingly brief. In reality, who can guarantee that this outcome will not take place within ten years, five years, or even less?
The proximity, indeed the eventual imminence, of this utter devastation is indubitably one of the notes that indicate the greatest change in the world conjuncture when we contrast the horizons of 1959 and 1976.
A. On the Road to Its Apogee, the Third Revolution Studiously Avoided Total and Useless Adventures
Even though the mentors of the Third Revolution have the capacity to launch themselves at any moment in an adventure for the complete conquest of the world by a series of wars, political blows, economic crises, and bloody revolutions, clearly such an adventure presents considerable risks. The mentors of the Third Revolution will accept running these risks only if it seems indispensable to them.
In effect, if continuous use of classic methods carried communism to the pinnacles of power without exposing the revolutionary process to risks not carefully circumscribed and calculated, it is understandable that those who guide the universal Revolution hope to attain total world domination without exposing their work to the risk of irreparable catastrophes, inherent to every great adventure.
B. Adventure in This Revolution´s Next Stages?
The success of the usual methods of the Third Revolution is endangered by the rise of unfavorable psychological circumstances that have become strongly accentuated over the last twenty years.
Will such circumstances compel communism to choose adventure henceforth?
At the end of 1989, the highest directors of international communism decided the moment had finally arrived to initiate communism´s greatest political maneuver.
This maneuver would consist in demolishing the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. Its effects would coincide with the implementation of the "liberalizing" programs of glasnost (1985) and perestroika (1986) so as to precipitate the apparent dismantling of the Third Revolution in the Soviet world.
In turn, this dismantling would gain for its chief promoter and executor, Mikhail Gorbachev, the emphatic sympathy and unreserved confidence of Western governments and of numerous private economic powers of the West.
From these, the Kremlin could expect a massive inflow of financial resources for its empty coffers.
The ample fulfillment of this expectation enabled Gorbachev and crew to continue floating, tiller in hand, on a sea of misery, indolence, and inaction that the unhappy Russian populace, until recently subjected to complete state capitalism, continues to face with disconcerting passivity. This passivity is propitious to the generalization of moral apathy and chaos and perhaps to the formation of an internal contentious crisis that could degenerate into a civil or world war. 71
Such was the setting when the sensational and hazy events of August 1991 broke out, with Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and others as protagonists, in this game that paved the way first for the transformation of the U.S.S.R. into a loose confederation of states and afterwards for its dissolution.
There is talk of the prospective fall of Fidel Castro´s regime in Cuba and the possible invasion of Western Europe of hordes of famished people from the East and the Maghreb. The several attempts made by multitudes of needy Albanians to enter Italy could have been a heralding of this new "barbarian invasion."
In the Iberian Peninsula, as in other parts of Europe, there are some who associate these hypotheses with the effects of the presence of multitudes of Mohammedans casually admitted in previous years at several points of the continent and with construction projects for a bridge over the strait of Gibraltar, which would facilitate further Moslem invasions of Europe.
There would be a curious similarity of effects between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the building of this bridge: Both would open the European continent to invasions analogous to those Charlemagne victoriously repelled, namely, the barbarian or semi-barbarian hordes from the East and the Mohammedan hordes from regions south of the European continent.
One would say that the premedieval scenario is repeated.
Yet, something is missing; the ardor of springtime faith among the Catholic populations called to confront both impacts simultaneously. Above all, someone is lacking: Where can one find today a man on par with Charlemagne?
Were we to imagine the development of these hypotheses in the West, the magnitude and drama of their consequences would certainly astound us - even though our overview does not encompass all the consequences being predicted by experts from different intellectual circles and by objective media.
For example, there is a growing opposition between consumer countries and poor countries, that is, between rich industrialized nations and nations that are mere producers of raw materials.
This opposition is expected to result in a world-wide clash between two sets of ideologies: one in favor of unlimited enrichment; the other, of "miserabilist: subconsumerism.
This eventual clash inevitably brings to mind the class struggle proclaimed by Marx.
Therefore we ask: Will this struggle be a projection, on a world scale, of a clash analogous to the one Marx envisioned primarily as a socioeconomic phenomenon within nations, a struggle that will involve every nation according to its own characteristics?
If this happens, will the struggle between the First and Third Worlds become a disguise by which a metamorphosed Marxism, shamed by its catastrophic socioeconomic failure, tries, with renewed chances of success, to attain the final victory, a victory that, so far, has eluded Gorbachev, who though certainly not the doctor is at least the bard and prestidigitator of perestroika?
Yes, of perestroika, which is undoubtedly a refinement of communism, as confessed by its author in his propagandistic essay Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World.
"The aim of this reform is to ensure...the transition from an excessively centralized management system relaying on orders, to a democratic one, based on a combination of democratic centralism and self-management."72
And what is this self-management if not "the supreme objective of the Soviet state," as established in the Preamble to the Constitution of the former U.S.S.R.?
2. Unanticipated Obstacles To The Third Revolution´s Use Of Classic Methods
A. The Decline of Persuasive Power
Let us examine the circumstances that may force communism to choose the path of adventure.
The first is the decline of the persuasive power of communist proselytism.
There was a time when explicit and categorical indoctrination was international communism´s principal recruiting method.
For reasons too extensive to enumerate, conditions have become considerably adverse to such indoctrination in almost all the West and in vast segments of public opinion. Communism´s dialectics and its full and open doctrinal propaganda have visibly declined in persuasive power.
This explains why in our days communist propaganda is carried out in an increasingly disguised, mild, and gradual way.
Its disguise is effected either by spreading sparse and veiled Marxist principles through socialist literature, or by instilling in the culture of the establishment itself certain principles that, like seeds, later bear fruit, leading centrists to an inadvertent and gradual acceptance of the communist doctrine in its entirety.
B. The Decline in the Capacity of Leadership
This decrease in the Red creed´s direct persuasive power over the multitudes - which the recourse to these indirect, slow, and laborious methods denotes - is accompanied by a correlative decline in communism´s leadership capacity.
Let us examine how these correlative phenomena are manifested and what their fruits are.
- Hatred, Class Struggle, Revolution
Essentially, the communist movement is and considers itself to be a revolution born of class hatred. Violence is the method most consistent with it. This is the direct and fulminating method, from which the mentors of communism expected the greatest results with the least risk in the shortest possible time.
This method presupposes a leadership capacity in the communist parties. In the past, this capacity enabled them to create discontent, transform it into hatred, articulate this hatred in an immense conspiracy, and thus succeed, with the "atomic" force of this hatred´s impetus, in destroying the present order and implanting communism.
- The Decline in Guidance of Hatred and in Use of Violence
But the capacity to guide hatred is also slipping from the hands of the communists.
We will not extend this writing by going into an explanation of the complex causes of this fact. We limit ourselves to observing that violence resulted in fewer and fewer advantages for the communists during these twenty years. To prove this, we need only recall the invariable failure of the guerrilla warfare and terrorism spread throughout Latin America.
It is quite true that violence has been dragging virtually all of Africa toward communism. But this says very little about the tendencies of public opinion in the rest of the world. The primitivism of most of Africa´s aboriginal populations places them in special and unequivocal conditions. The growth of violence there has been due not so much to ideological motives as to anti-colonialist resentments, which communist propaganda exploited with its customary astuteness.
- The Fruit and Proof of This Decline: The Third Revolution Metamorphoses Into a Smiling Revolution
The clearest proof that over the last twenty or thirty years the Third Revolution has been losing its capacity to create and direct the revolutionary hatred lies in its self-imposed metamorphosis.
During the post-Stalinist thaw with the West, the Third Revolution donned a smiling mask, exchanged polemics for dialogue, pretended to be changing its mentality and attitude, and welcomed all sorts of collaboration with the adversaries it had tried to crush through violence.
In the international sphere, the Revolution thus successively passed from the Cold War to peaceful coexistence, then to the "dropping of ideological barriers," and finally to frank collaboration with the capitalist powers, labeled, in the language of publicity, "Ostpolitik" or "detente."
In the internal sphere of the various Western countries, the politique de la main tendue (policy of the extended hand), which had been a mere artifice for deceiving a small minority of leftist Catholics during the Stalin era, became a true detente between communists and pro-capitalists. It was an ideal way for the Reds to initiate cordial relations and fraudulent approximations with all their adversaries, whether religious or temporal.
Out of this came a series of "friendly" tactics: the fellow travelers, the legalistic "Eurocommunism" (affable, and cautious toward Moscow), the "historic compromise," and the like.
As we have said, these stratagems provide advantages for the Third Revolution today. But they are slow, gradual, and dependent on a myriad of variables for their fruition.
At the height of its power, the Third Revolution ceased to threaten and attack and began to smile and request. It ceased advancing in military cadence, shod in cossack boots, in order to progress slowly at a discreet pace. It abandoned the straight path - the shortest and chose a zigzag path marked with uncertainty.
What an enormous change in twenty years!
C. Objection: The Communist Successes in Italy and France
But, someone will object, the successes of these tactics in Italy and France do not permit one to affirm that communism is retreating in the free world, or even that the smiling communism of today is progressing more slowly than the scowling communism of the Lenin and Stalin years.
First of all, in answer to this, one must say that the general elections in Sweden, West Germany, and Finland, as well as the regional elections and the present instability of the Labor Government in Great Britain, attest to the inappetence of the great masses for socialist "paradises," communist violence, and so on.73 There are expressive signs that the example of these countries has already begun to reverberate in those two great Catholic Latin nations of Western Europe, thus hindering the communist advance.
But, in our opinion, it is necessary above all to question how authentically communist is the growing number of votes obtained by the Italian Communist party or the French Socialist party (of which we speak since the French Communist party is stagnant). Both parties are far from having benefited only from the votes of their own electorates. Certainly considerable Catholic support - whose real amplitude only history will one day reveal in its full extent - has created entirely exceptional illusions, weaknesses, apathies, and complicities around the Italian Communist party. The electoral projection of these shocking and artificial circumstances explains, in large measure, the growth in the number of people voting for the Communist party, many of whom are by no means communist voters. Nor should we forget the direct or indirect influence of certain Croesuses upon the voting. Their frankly collaborationist attitude toward communism allows electoral maneuvers from which the Third Revolution draws an obvious profit. Analogous observations can be made in regard to the French Socialist party.
3. Metamphosed Hatred And Violence Generate Total Revolutionary Psychological Warfare
To grasp more clearly the scope of these immense changes in the communist panorama, it is necessary to analyze, as a whole, communism´s great present-day hope, namely, revolutionary psychological warfare.
As we have already said, international communism - though necessarily born of hatred and turned by its own internal logic to the use of violence exercised by means of wars, revolutions, and assassinations - was compelled by great, profound changes in public opinion to dissimulate its rancor and to pretend it had desisted from these means.
Now, if such desistance were sincere, international communism would have denied itself to the point of self-destruction.
But this is far from being the case. Communism uses the smile only as a weapon of aggression and warfare. It does not eliminate violence but transfers it from the field of physical and palpable operations to the field of impalpable psychological actuations. Its objective: to gradually and invisibly obtain the victory in the interior of souls that it could not win through drastic and visible means, according to the classic methods, because of certain circumstances.
Of course, this is not a question of carrying out a few sparse and sporadic operations in the realm of the spirit. On the contrary, it is a question of a true war of conquest - psychological, yes, but total - targeting the whole man and all men in all countries.
With the Sorbonne student rebellion in May 1968 numerous socialist and Marxist authors generally came to recognize the need for a form of revolution that would prepare the way for political and socioeconomic changes by influencing everyday life, customs, mentalities, and ways of living. This modality of revolutionary psychological warfare is known as the cultural revolution.
According to these authors, only this preponderantly psychological and tendential revolution could change the public´s mentality to the point that would permit implementing the egalitarian utopia. Without this mental change, no structural change could last.
This concept of cultural revolutionencompasses what the 1959 edition of Revolution and Counter-Revolutiontermed the "Revolution in the tendencies." 74
We insist on this concept of total revolutionary psychological warfare. In fact, psychological warfare targets the whole psyche of man. That is, it acts on him in the various powers of the soul and in every fiber of his mentality. It targets all men: partisans or sympathizers of the Third Revolution as well as neutrals and even adversaries. It uses any means. At each step it needs to have at its disposal a specific factor to lead each social group and even each man imperceptibly closer to communism, however slightly. And this is so in every area: in religious, political, social, and economic convictions; in cultural attitudes; in artistic preferences; and in the ways of being and acting in the family, in the workplace, and in society.
A. The Two Great Goals of Revolutionary Psychological Warfare
Given the Third Revolution´s present difficulties in carrying out ideological recruitment, the most useful of its activities is aimed not at its friends and sympathizers, but at the neutrals and its adversaries:
a. to deceive and slowly put the neutrals to sleep;
b. to divide at every step, disarticulate, isolate, terrorize, defame, persecute, and block its adversaries.
These are, in our view, the two great goals of revolutionary psychological warfare.
In this way, the Third Revolution becomes capable of winning - not so much by increasing the number of its friends as by destroying its adversaries.
Obviously, to carry on this warfare, communism mobilizes all the means of action it possesses in Western countries as a result of the apogee attained there by the Third Revolution´s offensive.
B. Total Revolutionary Psychological Warfare: A Result of the Third Revolution´s Apogee and Current Problems
Total revolutionary psychological warfare therefore results from a combination of the two contradictory factors previously described: on the one hand, communism´s peak of influence over almost all key points of the great machine that is Western society; on the other, its diminishing ability to persuade and lead the profound levels of Western public opinion.
4. The Third Revolution´s Psychological Offensive Within The Church
It would be impossible to describe this psychological warfare without carefully examining its development in what is the very soul of the West, that is, Christianity, and more precisely the Catholic religion, which is Christianity in its absolute fullness and unique authenticity.
A. The Second Vatican Council
Within the perspective of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the greatest success attained by the smiling post-Stalinist communism was the Second Vatican Council´s enigmatic, disconcerting, incredible, and apocalyptically tragic silence about communism.
It was the desire of this Council to be pastoral and not dogmatic. And, in fact, it did not have a dogmatic scope. But its omission regarding communism might make it go down in history as the apastoral Council.
We shall explain the special sense in which we make this statement.
Imagine an immense flock languishing in poor, arid fields and being attacked on all sides by swarms of bees and wasps and birds of prey. The shepherds begin to irrigate the fields and drive away the swarms and birds. Can this activity be termed pastoral? In theory, certainly.
However, if at the same time the flock were under attack by packs of voracious wolves, many of them covered with sheepskins, and the pastors fought against the insects and birds without making any effort to unmask or drive away the wolves, could their work be considered pastoral, proper to good and faithful shepherds?
In other words, did those in the Second Vatican Council who wished to scare away the lesser adversaries but gave free rein - by their silence - to the greater adversary act as true pastors?
Using "aggiornate" tactics (about which the least that can be said is that they are contestable in theory and proving ruinous in practice), the Second Vatican Council tried to scare away, let us say, bees, wasps, and birds of prey. But its silence about communism left full liberty to the wolves. The work of this Council cannot be inscribed as effectively pastoral either in history or in the Book of Life.
It is painful to say this. But, in this sense, the evidence singles out the Second Vatican Council as one of the greatest calamities, if not the greatest, in the history of the Church. From the Council on, the "smoke of Satan"75 penetrated the Church in unbelievable proportions. And this smoke is spreading day by day, with the terrible force of gases in expansion. To the scandal of uncountable souls, the Mystical Body of Christ entered a sinister process of self-destruction, as it were.
The historic declaration of Paul VI in the allocution Resistite fortes in fide, of June 29, 1972, is fundamental for a better understanding of the calamities in the post-Conciliar phase of the Church. We quote thePoliglotta Vaticana.
The same Pontiff, in an allocution to the students of the Pontifical Lombard Seminary on December 7, 1968, had affirmed:
His Holiness John Paul II also painted a somber picture of the Church´s situation.
In a similar vein, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith, later stated:
History narrates the innumerable dramas the Church has suffered in the twenty centuries of her existence: oppositions that germinated outside her and tried to destroy her from outside; malignancies that formed within her, were cut off by her, and thereafter ferociously tried to destroy her from outside.
When, however, has history witnessed an attempted demolition of the Church like the present one? No longer undertaken by an adversary, it was termed a "self-destruction" in a most lofty pronouncement having world-wide repercussion.80
From this resulted an immense debacle for the Church and what still remains of Christian civilization. The Ostpolitik of the Vatican, for example, and the massive infiltration of communism into Catholic circles are effects of all these calamities. And they constitute additional successes of the psychological offensive of the Third Revolution against the Church.
On reading these lines about Ostpolitik, someone could ask if the enormous changes that took place in Russia resulted from an ingenious move by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Perhaps the Vatican, on the basis of the best information, foresaw that communism, corroded by internal crises, would begin in its turn to self-destruct. And to encourage the world headquarters of materialistic atheism to this autodemolition, the Catholic Church, situated on the other extreme of the ideological spectrum, feigned her own destruction. Perhaps this is what led communism to markedly diminish its persecution of the Church. After all, if both were moribund, and arrangement would be understandable. In other words, it is to the flexibility of the Church that we should attribute the conditions for the flexibility of the communist world.
It would be fitting to reply that if the members of the Sacred Hierarchy knew that indigence and ruin would force communism to self-destruct, they should have denounced the misery and convoked all the peoples of the West to prepare the way for rehabilitating Russia and the world as soon as communism effectively collapsed.
They should not have remained silent, letting the phenomenon evolve without benefiting from Catholic influence and the generous and solicitous cooperation of Western governments , since only this denunciation could have prevented the Soviet collapse from reaching its present dead end, wherein everything is misery and imbroglio.
In any case, it is false to say that the self-destruction of the Church has hastened the self-destruction of communism - unless there were a secret treaty between the two in this regard.
But such a treaty - or suicidal pact - would lack any legitimacy and usefulness for the Catholic world, not to mention everything in this mere hypothesis of offense to the popes in whose pontificates this double euthanasia was supposedly arranged.
B. The Church: Today´s Center of Conflict Between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution
In 1959, the year we wrote Revolution and the Counter-Revolution, the Church was considered the great spiritual force against the worldwide expansion of the communist sect.
In 1976, innumerable ecclesiastics, including bishops, figure as accomplices by omission, as collaborators, and even as driving forces of the Third Revolution. Progressivism, installed almost everywhere, is converting the formerly verdant forest of the Catholic Church into wood that can easily be set afire by communism.
In a word, the extent of this change is such that we do not hesitate to affirm that the center - the most sensitive and truly decisive point in the fight between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution - has shifted from the temporal to the spiritual society.
The Holy Church is now this center. In her, progressivists, cryptocommunists, and procommunists confront antiprogressivists and anticommunists.81
C. Reactions Based on Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Has the efficacy of Revolution and Counter-Revolution been annulled by these numerous changes? On the contrary.
In 1968, the TFPs then existing in South America, inspired in particular by Part II of this essay ("The Counter-Revolution"), organized national petition drives addressed to Paul VI, requesting measures against leftist infiltration into the Catholic clergy and laity of South America.
Altogether, 2,060,368 people in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay signed the petition during a 58-day period.
To our knowledge, it is the only mass petition - on any subject - signed by the sons of four South American nations. And, as far as we know, it is the largest petition in the history of these four countries.82
The answer of Paul VI was not merely silence and inaction. It was - how it pains us to say it - a series of acts whose effect continues to give prestige and facility of action to many promoters of Catholic leftism today.
At the sight of this rising tide of communist infiltration into the Holy Church, the TFPs and like organizations did not become discouraged. And in 1974 each of them published a declaration83 expressing their inconformity with the Vatican Ostpolitik and their resolve "to resist to the face."84
One of the declaration´s passages, referring to Paul VI, expresses the document´s spirit:
In almost all countries, the respective edition included a prologue describing numerous and impressive national events analogous to what had occurred in Chile.
The response of the public to this great publicity effort can be termed a victory: 56,000 copies were printed in South America alone, where, in the most populous countries, the total pressrun of a book of this nature, when successful, is usually 5,000 copies.
In Spain, more than 1,000 secular and regular priests from all regions of the country signed an impressive petition giving the Sociedad Cultural Covadonga86 their firm support for the courageous prologue of the book´s Spanish edition.
D. The Usefulness of the Action of the TFPs and Like Organizations Inspired by Revolution and Counter-Revolution
In this specific battlefield, what has been the practical effect of the counter-revolutionary activity of the TFPs, inspired by Revolution and Counter-Revolution?
By denouncing the danger of communist infiltration to Catholic opinion, the TFPs have opened the eyes of Catholics to the snares of unfaithful pastors. Consequently, the latter are leading fewer and fewer sheep along the paths of perdition onto which they themselves have wandered, as even a summary observation of the facts leads one to conclude.
This is not a victory in itself, but it is a precious and indispensable condition for one. The TFPs give thanks to Our Lady for being able, within the spirit and methods of the second part of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, to do their share in the great struggle in which other wholesome forces - one or another of great scope and capability for action - are presently engaged.
5. An Assessment Of Twenty Years of The Third Revolution According To The Criteria Of Revolution and Counter-Revolution
The situation of the Third Revolution and the Counter-Revolution has been outlined herein on the basis of how they appear shortly before the twentieth anniversary of the publication of this book.
On the one hand, the apogee of the Third Revolution makes a success of the Counter-Revolution in the near future more difficult than ever.
On the other, the same anti-socialist allergy that presently constitutes a grave obstacle to the victory of communism creates medium-term conditions that are decidedly favorable for the Counter-Revolution.
The various counter-revolutionary groups spread throughout the world have the noble historic responsibility of making good use of these conditions.
The TFPs have strived to contribute their part to the common effort, having spread during the last twenty years across the Americas, with a new TFP in France, giving rise to a similar dynamic organization in the Iberian peninsula, and projecting its name and contacts in other countries of the Old World with the strong desire of working with all the counter-revolutionary groups fighting there.87
Twenty years after the launching of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the TFPs and similar organizations stand shoulder to shoulder with the front-line organizations in the counter-revolutionary struggle.
As we have seen,69 three great revolutions constituted the chief stages of the process to gradually demolish the Church and Christian civilization: in the sixteenth century, humanism, the Renaissance, and Protestantism (First Revolution); in the eighteenth century, the French Revolution (Second Revolution); and in the second decade of this century, Communism (Third Revolution).
These three revolutions can only be understood as parts of an immense whole that is the Revolution.
Since the Revolution is a process, it is obvious that, from 1917 to the present, the Third Revolution has continued its course. It is now at a true apogee.
When we consider the territories and populations subject to communist regimes, we see that the Third Revolution holds sway over a world empire without precedent in history. This empire is a continuous cause of insecurity and disunion among the greatest noncommunist nations. Moreover, the leaders of the Third Revolution control the strings that move, throughout the noncommunist world, the openly communist parties and the immense network of cryptocommunists, paracommunists, and useful idiots infiltrated not only into the noncommunist, socialist, and other parties, but also into the churches,70 professional and cultural associations, banks, the press, television, radio, the movie industry, and the like. And as if this were not enough, the Third Revolution applies with devastating efficacy - as we shall subsequently explain - the tactics of psychological conquest. With these tactics, communism is succeeding in reducing immense segments of the noncommunist Western public opinion to a foolish apathy. Such tactics enable the Third Revolution to expect, in this terrain, yet more remarkable successes that are even more disconcerting to observers who analyze events from outside the Third Revolution.
Commerntary
Crisis in the Third Revolution: An Inevitable Fruit of the Marxist UtopiasThe international dimensions of the Third Revolution´s apogee was already notorious, as the text notes. With the passing of time, the general picture of this apogee became even clearer, whether on account of the geographical and populational expansion of communist domination, the worldwide diffusion of Red propaganda and the weight of the communist parties in the Western world, or the penetration of communist tendencies into national cultures.
These factors - heightened by a global panic of the atomic threat that Soviet aggressiveness posed to all continents - led to a policy of almost universal softness and capitulation in relation to Moscow: the German and Vatican Ostpolitiken, the sweeping wind of unconditional pacifism, the proliferation of political slogans and formulas that prepared so many bourgeois to view the triumph of communism as inevitable in the near future.
Have we not all lived under the psychological pressure of this leftist optimism, which was enigmatic as a sphinx for the indolent centrists and threatening as a leviathan for those - like the TFPs and followers of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in so many countries - who well discerned the "apocalypse" to which this was leading?
How few then were those who perceived that this leviathan was afflicted by a worsening crisis it could not overcome since it was an inevitable fruit of Marxist utopias!
This crisis now seems to have disintegrated the leviathan. But, as will be seen further on, this disintegration has spread an even more deadly climate of crisis throughout the world
The inertia -when not the overt and substantial collaboration - of so many "democratic" governments and crafty private economic powers of the West in face of communism (already so powerful) paints a dreadful global panorama.
Under these conditions, should the course of the revolutionary process continue as it has heretofore, it is humanly inevitable that the general triumph of the Third Revolution will ultimately impose itself on the whole world. How soon? Many would be alarmed if; as a mere hypothesis, we were to suggest twenty years. To them, this period would seem surprisingly brief. In reality, who can guarantee that this outcome will not take place within ten years, five years, or even less?
The proximity, indeed the eventual imminence, of this utter devastation is indubitably one of the notes that indicate the greatest change in the world conjuncture when we contrast the horizons of 1959 and 1976.
A. On the Road to Its Apogee, the Third Revolution Studiously Avoided Total and Useless Adventures
Even though the mentors of the Third Revolution have the capacity to launch themselves at any moment in an adventure for the complete conquest of the world by a series of wars, political blows, economic crises, and bloody revolutions, clearly such an adventure presents considerable risks. The mentors of the Third Revolution will accept running these risks only if it seems indispensable to them.
In effect, if continuous use of classic methods carried communism to the pinnacles of power without exposing the revolutionary process to risks not carefully circumscribed and calculated, it is understandable that those who guide the universal Revolution hope to attain total world domination without exposing their work to the risk of irreparable catastrophes, inherent to every great adventure.
B. Adventure in This Revolution´s Next Stages?
The success of the usual methods of the Third Revolution is endangered by the rise of unfavorable psychological circumstances that have become strongly accentuated over the last twenty years.
Will such circumstances compel communism to choose adventure henceforth?
Commentary
Perestroika and Glasnost: Dismantling the Third Revolution or Metamorphosing Communism?At the end of 1989, the highest directors of international communism decided the moment had finally arrived to initiate communism´s greatest political maneuver.
This maneuver would consist in demolishing the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. Its effects would coincide with the implementation of the "liberalizing" programs of glasnost (1985) and perestroika (1986) so as to precipitate the apparent dismantling of the Third Revolution in the Soviet world.
In turn, this dismantling would gain for its chief promoter and executor, Mikhail Gorbachev, the emphatic sympathy and unreserved confidence of Western governments and of numerous private economic powers of the West.
From these, the Kremlin could expect a massive inflow of financial resources for its empty coffers.
The ample fulfillment of this expectation enabled Gorbachev and crew to continue floating, tiller in hand, on a sea of misery, indolence, and inaction that the unhappy Russian populace, until recently subjected to complete state capitalism, continues to face with disconcerting passivity. This passivity is propitious to the generalization of moral apathy and chaos and perhaps to the formation of an internal contentious crisis that could degenerate into a civil or world war. 71
Such was the setting when the sensational and hazy events of August 1991 broke out, with Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and others as protagonists, in this game that paved the way first for the transformation of the U.S.S.R. into a loose confederation of states and afterwards for its dissolution.
There is talk of the prospective fall of Fidel Castro´s regime in Cuba and the possible invasion of Western Europe of hordes of famished people from the East and the Maghreb. The several attempts made by multitudes of needy Albanians to enter Italy could have been a heralding of this new "barbarian invasion."
In the Iberian Peninsula, as in other parts of Europe, there are some who associate these hypotheses with the effects of the presence of multitudes of Mohammedans casually admitted in previous years at several points of the continent and with construction projects for a bridge over the strait of Gibraltar, which would facilitate further Moslem invasions of Europe.
There would be a curious similarity of effects between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the building of this bridge: Both would open the European continent to invasions analogous to those Charlemagne victoriously repelled, namely, the barbarian or semi-barbarian hordes from the East and the Mohammedan hordes from regions south of the European continent.
One would say that the premedieval scenario is repeated.
Yet, something is missing; the ardor of springtime faith among the Catholic populations called to confront both impacts simultaneously. Above all, someone is lacking: Where can one find today a man on par with Charlemagne?
Were we to imagine the development of these hypotheses in the West, the magnitude and drama of their consequences would certainly astound us - even though our overview does not encompass all the consequences being predicted by experts from different intellectual circles and by objective media.
For example, there is a growing opposition between consumer countries and poor countries, that is, between rich industrialized nations and nations that are mere producers of raw materials.
This opposition is expected to result in a world-wide clash between two sets of ideologies: one in favor of unlimited enrichment; the other, of "miserabilist: subconsumerism.
This eventual clash inevitably brings to mind the class struggle proclaimed by Marx.
Therefore we ask: Will this struggle be a projection, on a world scale, of a clash analogous to the one Marx envisioned primarily as a socioeconomic phenomenon within nations, a struggle that will involve every nation according to its own characteristics?
If this happens, will the struggle between the First and Third Worlds become a disguise by which a metamorphosed Marxism, shamed by its catastrophic socioeconomic failure, tries, with renewed chances of success, to attain the final victory, a victory that, so far, has eluded Gorbachev, who though certainly not the doctor is at least the bard and prestidigitator of perestroika?
Yes, of perestroika, which is undoubtedly a refinement of communism, as confessed by its author in his propagandistic essay Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World.
"The aim of this reform is to ensure...the transition from an excessively centralized management system relaying on orders, to a democratic one, based on a combination of democratic centralism and self-management."72
And what is this self-management if not "the supreme objective of the Soviet state," as established in the Preamble to the Constitution of the former U.S.S.R.?
2. Unanticipated Obstacles To The Third Revolution´s Use Of Classic Methods
A. The Decline of Persuasive Power
Let us examine the circumstances that may force communism to choose the path of adventure.
The first is the decline of the persuasive power of communist proselytism.
There was a time when explicit and categorical indoctrination was international communism´s principal recruiting method.
For reasons too extensive to enumerate, conditions have become considerably adverse to such indoctrination in almost all the West and in vast segments of public opinion. Communism´s dialectics and its full and open doctrinal propaganda have visibly declined in persuasive power.
This explains why in our days communist propaganda is carried out in an increasingly disguised, mild, and gradual way.
Its disguise is effected either by spreading sparse and veiled Marxist principles through socialist literature, or by instilling in the culture of the establishment itself certain principles that, like seeds, later bear fruit, leading centrists to an inadvertent and gradual acceptance of the communist doctrine in its entirety.
B. The Decline in the Capacity of Leadership
This decrease in the Red creed´s direct persuasive power over the multitudes - which the recourse to these indirect, slow, and laborious methods denotes - is accompanied by a correlative decline in communism´s leadership capacity.
Let us examine how these correlative phenomena are manifested and what their fruits are.
- Hatred, Class Struggle, Revolution
Essentially, the communist movement is and considers itself to be a revolution born of class hatred. Violence is the method most consistent with it. This is the direct and fulminating method, from which the mentors of communism expected the greatest results with the least risk in the shortest possible time.
This method presupposes a leadership capacity in the communist parties. In the past, this capacity enabled them to create discontent, transform it into hatred, articulate this hatred in an immense conspiracy, and thus succeed, with the "atomic" force of this hatred´s impetus, in destroying the present order and implanting communism.
- The Decline in Guidance of Hatred and in Use of Violence
But the capacity to guide hatred is also slipping from the hands of the communists.
We will not extend this writing by going into an explanation of the complex causes of this fact. We limit ourselves to observing that violence resulted in fewer and fewer advantages for the communists during these twenty years. To prove this, we need only recall the invariable failure of the guerrilla warfare and terrorism spread throughout Latin America.
It is quite true that violence has been dragging virtually all of Africa toward communism. But this says very little about the tendencies of public opinion in the rest of the world. The primitivism of most of Africa´s aboriginal populations places them in special and unequivocal conditions. The growth of violence there has been due not so much to ideological motives as to anti-colonialist resentments, which communist propaganda exploited with its customary astuteness.
- The Fruit and Proof of This Decline: The Third Revolution Metamorphoses Into a Smiling Revolution
The clearest proof that over the last twenty or thirty years the Third Revolution has been losing its capacity to create and direct the revolutionary hatred lies in its self-imposed metamorphosis.
During the post-Stalinist thaw with the West, the Third Revolution donned a smiling mask, exchanged polemics for dialogue, pretended to be changing its mentality and attitude, and welcomed all sorts of collaboration with the adversaries it had tried to crush through violence.
In the international sphere, the Revolution thus successively passed from the Cold War to peaceful coexistence, then to the "dropping of ideological barriers," and finally to frank collaboration with the capitalist powers, labeled, in the language of publicity, "Ostpolitik" or "detente."
In the internal sphere of the various Western countries, the politique de la main tendue (policy of the extended hand), which had been a mere artifice for deceiving a small minority of leftist Catholics during the Stalin era, became a true detente between communists and pro-capitalists. It was an ideal way for the Reds to initiate cordial relations and fraudulent approximations with all their adversaries, whether religious or temporal.
Out of this came a series of "friendly" tactics: the fellow travelers, the legalistic "Eurocommunism" (affable, and cautious toward Moscow), the "historic compromise," and the like.
As we have said, these stratagems provide advantages for the Third Revolution today. But they are slow, gradual, and dependent on a myriad of variables for their fruition.
At the height of its power, the Third Revolution ceased to threaten and attack and began to smile and request. It ceased advancing in military cadence, shod in cossack boots, in order to progress slowly at a discreet pace. It abandoned the straight path - the shortest and chose a zigzag path marked with uncertainty.
What an enormous change in twenty years!
C. Objection: The Communist Successes in Italy and France
But, someone will object, the successes of these tactics in Italy and France do not permit one to affirm that communism is retreating in the free world, or even that the smiling communism of today is progressing more slowly than the scowling communism of the Lenin and Stalin years.
First of all, in answer to this, one must say that the general elections in Sweden, West Germany, and Finland, as well as the regional elections and the present instability of the Labor Government in Great Britain, attest to the inappetence of the great masses for socialist "paradises," communist violence, and so on.73 There are expressive signs that the example of these countries has already begun to reverberate in those two great Catholic Latin nations of Western Europe, thus hindering the communist advance.
But, in our opinion, it is necessary above all to question how authentically communist is the growing number of votes obtained by the Italian Communist party or the French Socialist party (of which we speak since the French Communist party is stagnant). Both parties are far from having benefited only from the votes of their own electorates. Certainly considerable Catholic support - whose real amplitude only history will one day reveal in its full extent - has created entirely exceptional illusions, weaknesses, apathies, and complicities around the Italian Communist party. The electoral projection of these shocking and artificial circumstances explains, in large measure, the growth in the number of people voting for the Communist party, many of whom are by no means communist voters. Nor should we forget the direct or indirect influence of certain Croesuses upon the voting. Their frankly collaborationist attitude toward communism allows electoral maneuvers from which the Third Revolution draws an obvious profit. Analogous observations can be made in regard to the French Socialist party.
3. Metamphosed Hatred And Violence Generate Total Revolutionary Psychological Warfare
To grasp more clearly the scope of these immense changes in the communist panorama, it is necessary to analyze, as a whole, communism´s great present-day hope, namely, revolutionary psychological warfare.
As we have already said, international communism - though necessarily born of hatred and turned by its own internal logic to the use of violence exercised by means of wars, revolutions, and assassinations - was compelled by great, profound changes in public opinion to dissimulate its rancor and to pretend it had desisted from these means.
Now, if such desistance were sincere, international communism would have denied itself to the point of self-destruction.
But this is far from being the case. Communism uses the smile only as a weapon of aggression and warfare. It does not eliminate violence but transfers it from the field of physical and palpable operations to the field of impalpable psychological actuations. Its objective: to gradually and invisibly obtain the victory in the interior of souls that it could not win through drastic and visible means, according to the classic methods, because of certain circumstances.
Of course, this is not a question of carrying out a few sparse and sporadic operations in the realm of the spirit. On the contrary, it is a question of a true war of conquest - psychological, yes, but total - targeting the whole man and all men in all countries.
Commentary
Revolutionary Psychological Warfare: The Cultural Revolution and the Revolution in the TendenciesWith the Sorbonne student rebellion in May 1968 numerous socialist and Marxist authors generally came to recognize the need for a form of revolution that would prepare the way for political and socioeconomic changes by influencing everyday life, customs, mentalities, and ways of living. This modality of revolutionary psychological warfare is known as the cultural revolution.
According to these authors, only this preponderantly psychological and tendential revolution could change the public´s mentality to the point that would permit implementing the egalitarian utopia. Without this mental change, no structural change could last.
This concept of cultural revolutionencompasses what the 1959 edition of Revolution and Counter-Revolutiontermed the "Revolution in the tendencies." 74
We insist on this concept of total revolutionary psychological warfare. In fact, psychological warfare targets the whole psyche of man. That is, it acts on him in the various powers of the soul and in every fiber of his mentality. It targets all men: partisans or sympathizers of the Third Revolution as well as neutrals and even adversaries. It uses any means. At each step it needs to have at its disposal a specific factor to lead each social group and even each man imperceptibly closer to communism, however slightly. And this is so in every area: in religious, political, social, and economic convictions; in cultural attitudes; in artistic preferences; and in the ways of being and acting in the family, in the workplace, and in society.
A. The Two Great Goals of Revolutionary Psychological Warfare
Given the Third Revolution´s present difficulties in carrying out ideological recruitment, the most useful of its activities is aimed not at its friends and sympathizers, but at the neutrals and its adversaries:
a. to deceive and slowly put the neutrals to sleep;
b. to divide at every step, disarticulate, isolate, terrorize, defame, persecute, and block its adversaries.
These are, in our view, the two great goals of revolutionary psychological warfare.
In this way, the Third Revolution becomes capable of winning - not so much by increasing the number of its friends as by destroying its adversaries.
Obviously, to carry on this warfare, communism mobilizes all the means of action it possesses in Western countries as a result of the apogee attained there by the Third Revolution´s offensive.
B. Total Revolutionary Psychological Warfare: A Result of the Third Revolution´s Apogee and Current Problems
Total revolutionary psychological warfare therefore results from a combination of the two contradictory factors previously described: on the one hand, communism´s peak of influence over almost all key points of the great machine that is Western society; on the other, its diminishing ability to persuade and lead the profound levels of Western public opinion.
4. The Third Revolution´s Psychological Offensive Within The Church
It would be impossible to describe this psychological warfare without carefully examining its development in what is the very soul of the West, that is, Christianity, and more precisely the Catholic religion, which is Christianity in its absolute fullness and unique authenticity.
A. The Second Vatican Council
Within the perspective of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the greatest success attained by the smiling post-Stalinist communism was the Second Vatican Council´s enigmatic, disconcerting, incredible, and apocalyptically tragic silence about communism.
It was the desire of this Council to be pastoral and not dogmatic. And, in fact, it did not have a dogmatic scope. But its omission regarding communism might make it go down in history as the apastoral Council.
We shall explain the special sense in which we make this statement.
Imagine an immense flock languishing in poor, arid fields and being attacked on all sides by swarms of bees and wasps and birds of prey. The shepherds begin to irrigate the fields and drive away the swarms and birds. Can this activity be termed pastoral? In theory, certainly.
However, if at the same time the flock were under attack by packs of voracious wolves, many of them covered with sheepskins, and the pastors fought against the insects and birds without making any effort to unmask or drive away the wolves, could their work be considered pastoral, proper to good and faithful shepherds?
In other words, did those in the Second Vatican Council who wished to scare away the lesser adversaries but gave free rein - by their silence - to the greater adversary act as true pastors?
Using "aggiornate" tactics (about which the least that can be said is that they are contestable in theory and proving ruinous in practice), the Second Vatican Council tried to scare away, let us say, bees, wasps, and birds of prey. But its silence about communism left full liberty to the wolves. The work of this Council cannot be inscribed as effectively pastoral either in history or in the Book of Life.
It is painful to say this. But, in this sense, the evidence singles out the Second Vatican Council as one of the greatest calamities, if not the greatest, in the history of the Church. From the Council on, the "smoke of Satan"75 penetrated the Church in unbelievable proportions. And this smoke is spreading day by day, with the terrible force of gases in expansion. To the scandal of uncountable souls, the Mystical Body of Christ entered a sinister process of self-destruction, as it were.
Commentary
Astonishing Calamities in the Church´s Post-Conciliar PhaseThe historic declaration of Paul VI in the allocution Resistite fortes in fide, of June 29, 1972, is fundamental for a better understanding of the calamities in the post-Conciliar phase of the Church. We quote thePoliglotta Vaticana.
Referring to the situation of the Church today, the Holy Father affirmed that he had the feeling that"the smoke of Satan has entered into the temple of God through some crack." There is doubt, uncertainty, complexity, restlessness, dissatisfaction, confrontation. People no longer trust the Church; they trust the first secular profane prophet who speaks to us through some newspaper or social movement, running after him and asking him if he has the formula of true life. We do not realize that we are already owners and masters of it. Doubt has entered our consciences through windows that ought to be open to the light....This state of uncertainty also reigns in the Church. It was thought that after the Council the history of the Church would enter a sunny day. It entered instead a cloudy, stormy, dark, skeptical, and uncertain day. We preach ecumenism and yet we ourselves are farther and farther apart. We seek to dig abysses instead of filling them.
How did this happen? The Pope confided one of his opinions: An adverse power has intervened. His name is the devil, the mysterious being to which Saint Peter also alludes in his Epistle.76
The same Pontiff, in an allocution to the students of the Pontifical Lombard Seminary on December 7, 1968, had affirmed:
The Church finds herself in an hour of disquiet, of self-criticism, one might even say of self-destruction. It is like an acute and complex interior upheaval, which no one expected after the Council. One though of a blossoming, a serene expansion of the mature concepts of the Council. The Church still has this aspect of blossoming. But since "bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu," the aspect of sorrow has become most notable. The Church is also being wounded by those who are part of her.77
His Holiness John Paul II also painted a somber picture of the Church´s situation.
One must be realistic and acknowledge with a deep and pained sentiment that a great party of today´s Christians feel lost, confused, perplexed, and even disillusioned: ideas contradicting the revealed and unchanging Truth have been spread far and wide; outright heresies in the dogmatic and moral fields have been disseminated, creating doubt, confusion, and rebellion; even the liturgy has been altered. Immersed in intellectual and moral "relativism" and therefore in permissiveness, Christians are tempted by atheism, agnosticism, a vaguely moralistic illuminism, a sociological Christianity, without defined dogmas and without objective morality.78
In a similar vein, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith, later stated:
Results since the Council seem to be in cruel contrast to the expectations of all, beginning with those of John XXIII and Paul VI....The Popes and the Council Fathers were expecting a new Catholic unity, and instead one has encountered a dissension that - to use the words of Paul VI - seems to have gone from self-criticism to self-destruction. A new enthusiasm was expected, but too often there has been boredom and discouragement instead. A new leap forward was expected, but instead we find ourselves facing a process of progressive decadence....It must be clearly stated that a real reform of the Church presupposes an unequivocal turning away from the erroneous paths that led to indisputably negative consequences.79
History narrates the innumerable dramas the Church has suffered in the twenty centuries of her existence: oppositions that germinated outside her and tried to destroy her from outside; malignancies that formed within her, were cut off by her, and thereafter ferociously tried to destroy her from outside.
When, however, has history witnessed an attempted demolition of the Church like the present one? No longer undertaken by an adversary, it was termed a "self-destruction" in a most lofty pronouncement having world-wide repercussion.80
From this resulted an immense debacle for the Church and what still remains of Christian civilization. The Ostpolitik of the Vatican, for example, and the massive infiltration of communism into Catholic circles are effects of all these calamities. And they constitute additional successes of the psychological offensive of the Third Revolution against the Church.
Commentary
The Vatican OstpolitikOn reading these lines about Ostpolitik, someone could ask if the enormous changes that took place in Russia resulted from an ingenious move by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Perhaps the Vatican, on the basis of the best information, foresaw that communism, corroded by internal crises, would begin in its turn to self-destruct. And to encourage the world headquarters of materialistic atheism to this autodemolition, the Catholic Church, situated on the other extreme of the ideological spectrum, feigned her own destruction. Perhaps this is what led communism to markedly diminish its persecution of the Church. After all, if both were moribund, and arrangement would be understandable. In other words, it is to the flexibility of the Church that we should attribute the conditions for the flexibility of the communist world.
It would be fitting to reply that if the members of the Sacred Hierarchy knew that indigence and ruin would force communism to self-destruct, they should have denounced the misery and convoked all the peoples of the West to prepare the way for rehabilitating Russia and the world as soon as communism effectively collapsed.
They should not have remained silent, letting the phenomenon evolve without benefiting from Catholic influence and the generous and solicitous cooperation of Western governments , since only this denunciation could have prevented the Soviet collapse from reaching its present dead end, wherein everything is misery and imbroglio.
In any case, it is false to say that the self-destruction of the Church has hastened the self-destruction of communism - unless there were a secret treaty between the two in this regard.
But such a treaty - or suicidal pact - would lack any legitimacy and usefulness for the Catholic world, not to mention everything in this mere hypothesis of offense to the popes in whose pontificates this double euthanasia was supposedly arranged.
B. The Church: Today´s Center of Conflict Between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution
In 1959, the year we wrote Revolution and the Counter-Revolution, the Church was considered the great spiritual force against the worldwide expansion of the communist sect.
In 1976, innumerable ecclesiastics, including bishops, figure as accomplices by omission, as collaborators, and even as driving forces of the Third Revolution. Progressivism, installed almost everywhere, is converting the formerly verdant forest of the Catholic Church into wood that can easily be set afire by communism.
In a word, the extent of this change is such that we do not hesitate to affirm that the center - the most sensitive and truly decisive point in the fight between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution - has shifted from the temporal to the spiritual society.
The Holy Church is now this center. In her, progressivists, cryptocommunists, and procommunists confront antiprogressivists and anticommunists.81
C. Reactions Based on Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Has the efficacy of Revolution and Counter-Revolution been annulled by these numerous changes? On the contrary.
In 1968, the TFPs then existing in South America, inspired in particular by Part II of this essay ("The Counter-Revolution"), organized national petition drives addressed to Paul VI, requesting measures against leftist infiltration into the Catholic clergy and laity of South America.
Altogether, 2,060,368 people in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay signed the petition during a 58-day period.
To our knowledge, it is the only mass petition - on any subject - signed by the sons of four South American nations. And, as far as we know, it is the largest petition in the history of these four countries.82
The answer of Paul VI was not merely silence and inaction. It was - how it pains us to say it - a series of acts whose effect continues to give prestige and facility of action to many promoters of Catholic leftism today.
At the sight of this rising tide of communist infiltration into the Holy Church, the TFPs and like organizations did not become discouraged. And in 1974 each of them published a declaration83 expressing their inconformity with the Vatican Ostpolitik and their resolve "to resist to the face."84
One of the declaration´s passages, referring to Paul VI, expresses the document´s spirit:
On our knees, gazing with veneration at the person of His Holiness Pope Paul VI, we express all our fidelity to him. In this filial act we say to the Pastor of Pastors: "Our soul is Yours, our life is Yours. Order us to do whatever you wish. Only do not order us to cross our arms in face of the assailing Red wolf. To this our conscience is opposed.Not stopping at these efforts, the TFPs and like organizations in their respective countries promoted during the course of 1976 nine editions of the Chilean TFP best-seller, The Church of Silence in Chile: The TFP Proclaims the Whole Truth.85
In almost all countries, the respective edition included a prologue describing numerous and impressive national events analogous to what had occurred in Chile.
The response of the public to this great publicity effort can be termed a victory: 56,000 copies were printed in South America alone, where, in the most populous countries, the total pressrun of a book of this nature, when successful, is usually 5,000 copies.
In Spain, more than 1,000 secular and regular priests from all regions of the country signed an impressive petition giving the Sociedad Cultural Covadonga86 their firm support for the courageous prologue of the book´s Spanish edition.
D. The Usefulness of the Action of the TFPs and Like Organizations Inspired by Revolution and Counter-Revolution
In this specific battlefield, what has been the practical effect of the counter-revolutionary activity of the TFPs, inspired by Revolution and Counter-Revolution?
By denouncing the danger of communist infiltration to Catholic opinion, the TFPs have opened the eyes of Catholics to the snares of unfaithful pastors. Consequently, the latter are leading fewer and fewer sheep along the paths of perdition onto which they themselves have wandered, as even a summary observation of the facts leads one to conclude.
This is not a victory in itself, but it is a precious and indispensable condition for one. The TFPs give thanks to Our Lady for being able, within the spirit and methods of the second part of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, to do their share in the great struggle in which other wholesome forces - one or another of great scope and capability for action - are presently engaged.
5. An Assessment Of Twenty Years of The Third Revolution According To The Criteria Of Revolution and Counter-Revolution
The situation of the Third Revolution and the Counter-Revolution has been outlined herein on the basis of how they appear shortly before the twentieth anniversary of the publication of this book.
On the one hand, the apogee of the Third Revolution makes a success of the Counter-Revolution in the near future more difficult than ever.
On the other, the same anti-socialist allergy that presently constitutes a grave obstacle to the victory of communism creates medium-term conditions that are decidedly favorable for the Counter-Revolution.
The various counter-revolutionary groups spread throughout the world have the noble historic responsibility of making good use of these conditions.
The TFPs have strived to contribute their part to the common effort, having spread during the last twenty years across the Americas, with a new TFP in France, giving rise to a similar dynamic organization in the Iberian peninsula, and projecting its name and contacts in other countries of the Old World with the strong desire of working with all the counter-revolutionary groups fighting there.87
Twenty years after the launching of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the TFPs and similar organizations stand shoulder to shoulder with the front-line organizations in the counter-revolutionary struggle.
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