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.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was born in São Paulo on December 13, 1908, into a family associated with Brazil's traditional Catholic landowning elite. His father João Paulo Corrêa de Oliveira came from the sugar-planting aristocracy of Pernambuco, while his mother, Lucilia Ribeiro dos Santos, belonged to a prominent Paulista family connected to the coffee economy of São Paulo.
He was raised in São Paulo under the strong religious influence of his mother and educated at the Jesuit Colégio São Luís, then attended by much of the city's Catholic upper class. Biographers writing within the traditionalist Catholic milieu have emphasised the formative role of his mother's piety and of the Ignatian methods of spiritual formation he encountered at the Colégio, both of which he would later cite as decisive influences on his religious and intellectual outlook.
In the mid-1920s Corrêa de Oliveira enrolled at the Law School of the University of São Paulo.
Catholic Action and political career (1928–1944)
Marian Congregations and Catholic Electoral League
In 1928 Corrêa de Oliveira joined the Marian Congregations of São Paulo, the male lay devotional confraternity that was then one of the principal organisational vehicles of São Paulo's neo-Christendom Catholicism. A capable orator and organiser, he rose quickly within the movement and by the early 1930s had become one of its most prominent national figures.
The 1930 Revolution and the convening of a Constituent Assembly opened a political space that the Brazilian episcopate, led by Cardinal Sebastião Leme of Rio de Janeiro, sought to exploit through the foundation of the Catholic Electoral League (Liga Eleitoral Católica, LEC) in 1932. The LEC was conceived not as a confessional party but as a non-partisan pressure group: it vetted candidates from across the existing parties and endorsed those who pledged to support a Catholic legislative platform, including obligatory religious instruction in public schools, the constitutional prohibition of divorce, the civil recognition of religious marriage, and the establishment of military and prison chaplaincies. Corrêa de Oliveira was among the young Marian leaders who helped organise the League in São Paulo.
Although the LEC generally avoided fielding its own candidates, in São Paulo Archbishop Duarte Leopoldo e Silva placed Corrêa de Oliveira on the Single Ticket (Chapa Única) as a Catholic representative for the May 1933 elections to the National Constituent Assembly. Backed by the grassroots mobilisation of the Marian Congregations, he was elected at the age of 24, making him the youngest member of the Assembly.
In the Assembly Corrêa de Oliveira served as a leading voice of the Catholic bloc, pressing for the LEC platform to be written into the 1934 Constitution. The resulting text incorporated the substance of the LEC's demands, including the civil effects of religious marriage, optional religious instruction in public schools, and the establishment of chaplaincies in the armed forces and penal institutions — an outcome historians have characterised as the principal political success of the neo-Christendom Catholic project in interwar Brazil. After his single legislative term Corrêa de Oliveira did not seek re-election, instead taking up academic appointments at the Law Faculty of the University of São Paulo and, subsequently, the chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the [[Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo]], while continuing his work in lay Catholic organisations.
Catholic Action presidency and In Defense of Catholic Action
From 1935 Corrêa de Oliveira directed the São Paulo archdiocesan weekly O Legionário, which under his editorship grew from a parish bulletin into one of Brazil's most influential Catholic newspapers and the platform for a circle of traditionalist intellectuals — including the future bishops Antônio de Castro Mayer and Geraldo de Proença Sigaud — who would form the nucleus of his later organisational work. During the late 1930s and the wartime years the paper combined an uncompromising defence of Catholic orthodoxy with vigorous editorial opposition to Nazism and Italian fascism, at a time when sympathy for the European fascist regimes was not uncommon among segments of the Brazilian elite and clergy. Articles he had published in the early 1930s in the Rio-based journal A Ordem, by contrast, contained polemical writings on Jews that have been examined critically by historians of Brazilian Catholic thought.
In 1940 Corrêa de Oliveira was appointed the first president of the Archdiocesan Board of Catholic Action in São Paulo. From this position he became increasingly critical of what he regarded as the penetration of progressive and modernist currents into the Brazilian lay apostolate, associated above all with the influence of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. He set out his critique in In Defense of Catholic Action (Em Defesa da Ação Católica), published in 1943 with a preface by the Apostolic Nuncio to Brazil, Benedetto Aloisi Masella.
The book was poorly received within an episcopate that was itself shifting toward the currents Corrêa de Oliveira had attacked. The death of Cardinal Leme in 1942 had already weakened his standing in the hierarchy, and following the appointment of a more progressive archbishop in São Paulo in 1944 he lost the presidency of the Archdiocesan Board of Catholic Action; in 1947 he was removed from the editorship of O Legionário. These dismissals inaugurated what historians have described as a long period of ecclesiastical marginalisation, during which Corrêa de Oliveira and his closest collaborators operated outside the institutional structures of the Brazilian church.