Religion, by Olavo de Carvalho

This series of newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.

In the first part of this collection, “Faith vs. Ideology,” Olavo de Carvalho delves into the enduring conflict between truth and ignorance through three distinct articles. In "The Forbidden Testimony", he draws parallels between the biblical trial of Jesus and modern instances where individuals are unjustly condemned by biased authorities. Olavo highlights the misuse of labels like “fascist” by those historically complicit with totalitarian regimes, emphasizing the importance of faith and steadfastness against such injustices. In "From Myth to Ideology", he critiques Brazil’s spiritual barrenness, noting the nation’s misguided belief that material prosperity should precede spiritual development. Olavo contrasts profound founding myths with false ideologies, arguing that the Bible, as the foundational myth of Western civilization, is essential for genuine societal growth. Lastly, in "How to Read the Bible", Olavo discusses the need for engaging with the Bible and other significant texts as profound exercises in self-knowledge and spiritual exploration. He contends that true understanding requires internalization of the narratives and an openness to discovering deeper spiritual truths within oneself.

The second part, “Persecution vs. Silence,” features six articles where Olavo de Carvalho addresses the persecution of Christians and the broader war against religious populations. In "Beyond Satire", he argues that Christians face global persecution, with violent acts in Islamic and communist countries and cultural marginalization in the USA. Olavo criticizes the media for downplaying these persecutions and warns that anti-Christian sentiments in the West indirectly support atrocities abroad. In "The War Against Religions", he claims that militant violence against religious populations is misrepresented by mainstream media, which perpetuates the myth of inherent religious violence while ignoring anti-Christian persecution. “Crime Makeup Artists” discusses the “spiral of silence,” where relentless attacks on an individual’s or group’s honor lead to their withdrawal from public debate, effectively silencing them. Olavo asserts that exposing the attackers' false respectability is crucial to breaking this silence. In "Bad Adviser", he criticizes Catholics and Protestants who prioritize politeness over effective defense against attacks on religion, arguing that public sins demand a strong response to deter further aggression. “The Fight No One Wants to Pick” examines the media’s role in shaping public perception by selectively reporting news, creating a “second reality” detached from actual social conditions. Olavo highlights the exaggerated focus on pedophilia in the Catholic Church as an example of this manipulation. Finally, in "One Hundred Years of Pedophilia", he traces the cultural and historical roots of pedophilia, criticizing modern movements and the media for scapegoating the Catholic Church while promoting a permissive sexual culture. Olavo argues that the Church is unfairly targeted due to its historical opposition to pedophilia and warns against capitulating to these attacks.

• 1. Faith vs. Ideology
• The Forbidden Testimony
• From Myth to Ideology
• How to Read the Bible
• 2. Persecution vs. Silence
• Beyond Satire
• The War Against Religions
• Crime Makeup Artists
• Bad Adviser
• The Fight No One Wants to Pick
• One Hundred Years of Pedophilia

1. Faith vs. Ideology

The Forbidden Testimony

O Globo, July 14, 2001

And Kaipha was, in his own mind, a benefactor of mankind.

— William Blake

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

— William Butler Yeats

One of the passages that impresses me the most in the Gospel is the one where Jesus, accused of spreading suspicious teachings, appeals to the testimony of the public: “I have spoken openly to the world,” he says, “and said nothing in secret. Ask those who heard me.” One of the guards then slaps him. Jesus responds: "If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?"¹

When Northrop Frye demonstrated in The Great Code that ultimately all plots in fiction literature are prefigured in sacred books, he forgot to say that all events in our lives are prefigured in fiction literature. What is fiction, after all, if not the set of imaginary schemes of possible lives? At least that’s how Aristotle, Frye’s master, understood it. And what is the set of possible lives but the symphony of earthly echoes of divine life, the reverberation of the eternal in time? Our biographies are copies of a copy. Behind them, one single story took place: the life, passion, and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The scene of rejected testimony repeats itself millions of times over the centuries, wherever a writer, a teacher, an orator is accused of saying what he did not say, of teaching what he did not teach, of preaching what he did not preach. If at that moment he claims the public testimony of his writings, of his listeners, of everything that is well-known and documented, it does not free him from the ill will of the unjust judge. The simple desire to prove is taken as insolence. Silence the witnesses, suppress the documents: what matters is not the word of those who saw, read, or heard. What matters is the word of those who, having seen nothing, read nothing, heard nothing, conjecture, suspect, and accuse. Malicious ignorance becomes the source of authority, suppressing not only the facts but the mere possibility of alleging them. What matters is not to know, but to hate with intensity.

This eternal model reappears daily in our press, in parliament, in academic chairs, and in children’s schools, when those who displease the dominant consensus are labeled “fascists.” If they appeal to the testimony of their writings, claiming that they never said a word in favor of fascism, that they condemned it and preached the opposite, they should consider themselves lucky if in response they receive not a slap, but only a scornful laugh. In the tribunal of hell, the scorn of the scoundrels is the supreme proof. All the testimonies, all the documents in the world are not worth refuting it. More probative than that is only the guard’s slap.

Millions of young Brazilians are being educated in this pedagogy of Annas and Caiaphas. Soon they will be ready to, at the mere mention of certain names of which they know nothing, shout in unison: “Fascists!” Woe to those who fall under the piercing gaze of this dreadful young tribunal!

It is no coincidence that the accusation of fascism always comes from the faction that consolidated power in Russia with Nazi help, that sold Spain to the Francoists in exchange for Anglo-French favors, that supported so many nationalist militarisms everywhere, that in Brazil allied with the Vargas dictatorship and in Cuba, yes, in Cuba, supported the rise of Fulgencio Batista and then usurped the profits from his ousting engineered by the Americans. All this is known historical fact, at least to those who studied.

It goes without saying that, in the Nazi-fascist courts, analogous syntax governed the use of the accusation of “communist,” in those same years when Hitler and Stalin, beneath the surface contention between their devoted militants, exchanged favors, secret information, weapons, and money—long before the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact,² which merely formalized this macabre alliance in the eyes of the world.

But in the logic of the revolutionary soul, it is complicity in the crime itself that, by the well-known effect of hysterical inversion, grants the judge his fake authority to accuse. The more he has stained his hands with blood, the more his repressed self-hatred transforms, on the level of his false consciousness intoxicated with ideology, into indignant eloquence against the innocent. Such is the intimate mechanism of that passionate intensity that Yeats spoke of, of which only fanatical murderers are capable, and which disarms, by the overwhelming force of cynicism, the defenses of normal man. The modern ordinary man, emptied of spirit and reduced to relying on the external authority of the dominant consensus, does not resist the insane rhetoric of evil: under the violent frontal attack on truth, he always ends up yielding, admitting guilt for what he did not do, like thousands of defendants in the Moscow Trials in the 1930s. Only faith supported by the example of Christ can remain undisturbed and, before the assault of demonic lies, simply reply: “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?”

From Myth to Ideology

Jornal da Tarde, March 29, 2001

The lack of saints, mystics, and philosophers in a country of continental dimensions and five hundred years of existence is enough to make it a frightening spiritual anomaly, probably without a parallel in universal history.

However, even more abnormal is that no one seems to care about this, that everyone believes they must first create the ideal society, with 200 million satisfied and plump citizens, and only then, after that, concern themselves with acquiring some spiritual consistency. This senseless pretension is perhaps the greatest manifestation of collective contempt for the “one thing necessary” ever observed in the human species.

In the known historical possibilities, there is no example of a society that managed to fill every stomach before feeding hearts and brains. The most primitive peoples, the most rudimentary communities, already showed they knew some form of metaphysical knowledge preceded, in time and hierarchical order, the material organization of society — for society is made by men, and the organization of the human soul precedes the very possibility of rational action in society.

The expression “founding myth” is currently on the lips of our academics, but it is evident they have no idea what it means. They imagine it to be a massive collective illusion invented by clever members of the ruling class to place men at their service — a huge donkey carrot guiding the historical cart. My God! They think a founding myth is ideology.

The concept of a founding myth comes from Schelling. A founding myth is not an ideology. Ideology is a discourse that does not comprehend reality but motivates men to replace a misunderstood reality with another that they will not understand at all. Inspired by the ideology of socialism, Lenin’s followers replaced the Tsarist society, which they had a false understanding of, with the incomprehensible monstrosity that was Soviet society. Inspired by Hitler’s false social diagnoses, the Nazis dismantled a republic they did not understand and replaced it with an unintelligible nightmare. Guided by people who think a founding myth is ideology, a people who do not understand the root of their evils are preparing, in this country, to produce infinitely greater evils which, if they come to pass, may no longer be understood by any human intelligence.

Ideology is this: a discourse that, based on a false vision of the present, attracts men to build a future which, once realized, is too ugly for them to recognize as the work of their hands. Thus, the disillusioned followers of criminal ideologies rarely present themselves as what they are: failed accomplices of a crime without reward. They present themselves as victims betrayed by destiny. They falsify the past as they falsified the future.

A genuine founding myth, on the contrary, is an initial compacted truth that, over the course of history, unfolds its meaning and blossoms in the form of science, laws, values, and civilization. A founding myth is not a “cultural product,” simply because it, and only it, is the seed of all possible culture.

A founding myth generally consists of the symbolic narrative of events that actually happened, events so essential and significant that they end up transferring part of their pattern of meaning to everything that happens subsequently in a particular civilizational area. Thus, for example, Northrop Frye demonstrated that all known narrative schemes in great Western literature are variations of biblical plots.

Now, the narrative schemes of superior literature are the patterns of imaginative self-understanding of a civilization. And the patterns of imaginative self-understanding are, in turn, the possible action schemes.

The Bible, the founding myth of Western civilization, lies at the core of all our self-understanding and all our possibilities of action.

Outside of this, there is only ideology, error, madness. The radical disorientation of Brazilian society stems from the tenuous, increasingly distant, increasingly evanescent connection that our history has with the biblical roots of Western civilization. We have lost our understanding of our founding myth so much that we have come to want to replace it with tribal, indigenous, or African myths, as beautiful and suggestive as they may be, but inept to shape a vast and complex civilization. But today, we descend below tribal myths, which, limited as they were, had their truth. We no longer even want to build Brazil on partial truths. We want total falsehood. We want an ideology.

How to Read the Bible

Jornal do Brasil, January 17, 2008

When you read a novel or a play, you cannot judge the plausibility of the situations and characters unless you first let the plot impress you and be relived internally as a dream. Fiction is this: a directed waking dream. Since the characters do not physically exist (even if they historically existed in the past), you can only find them in your own soul, as symbols of human possibilities that are in you as they are in everyone, but which they embody in a clearer and more exemplary manner, separate from the contingencies that can obscure everyday experience. Reading fiction is an exercise in self-knowledge before it can be literary analysis, a school activity, or even entertainment: it is not fun to follow an opaque story, whose events do not evoke corresponding emotions.

The same requirement applies to history books, with the mitigating factor that the historian has usually already processed the data intellectually and provides us with a principle of understanding instead of the raw plot of events. If you do not grasp the actions of historical characters as symbols invested with psychological plausibility, you have no way to subsequently evaluate whether they are historically true or not. A history book must be read first as fiction, only later as reality.

The problem is that not all possibilities lying deep within our soul are known to us — and then we cannot recognize them when they appear in fiction or history. The result is that the narrative becomes opaque. Worse, you may let yourself be deceived by false resemblances, reducing the symbols of the narrative to conventional signs of already known possibilities, if not to banal stereotypes of the present. Internal recognition is not just a memory exercise but a serious effort to expand the imagination so that it can encompass even the most extreme and unusual possibilities. You cannot do this if you are not willing to discover in your soul monsters, heroes, and saints you would never have suspected to find there.

Understandably, monsters are easier to discover than heroes and saints. Fear, disgust, anger, and contempt are commonplace emotions, and they suffice to make plausible whatever seems worse than ourselves. But what is noble and elevated only becomes apparent to those who love it, and this love immediately brings with it a sense of duty, of obligation, as in Rilke’s famous sonnet where the perfection of an Apollo statue transcends mere aesthetic contemplation and calls the observer to change their life, to become better. The humiliating impression of not being up to this appeal almost automatically produces a negative reaction — resentment. Denying the existence of the better, reducing it to the banal, or making it a deceptive camouflage of the ugly and despicable, the soul finds momentary relief for its wounded pride, restoring a comforting self-image at the cost of miserably shortening the maximum measure of human possibilities.

If this problem exists in any fiction or history book, imagine in the Bible, where the central character is God himself. Opening oneself to the call of divine perfection is a lifetime’s work and more, and it is interspersed with countless defeats and humiliations — but without this, you will not understand a single word of the Bible. One hundred percent of militant atheism consists of resentment and the inability to read seriously.

2. Persecution vs. Silence

Beyond Satire

Folha de S.Paulo, August 31, 2004

There can be no discussion without the interlocutors having access to the same set of data. The data for this article are found in the books Their Blood Cries Out: The Untold Story of Persecution Against Christians in the Modern World by Paul A. Marshall and Lela Gilbert³ and Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity by David Limbaugh,⁴ and on the websites Religious Tolerance, Freedom House, Watson’s Web, and Persecution.⁵

From these sources, the first demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that an organized slaughter of Christians is happening in Islamic and communist countries, solely because they are Christians, reaching a total of more than two million victims since the last decade.

The second shows, with equal richness of evidence, a different kind of persecution observed on the other side of the world: the anti-Christian cultural genocide in the USA. Under the pressure of the politically correct lobby that dominates the upper classes and the media, American Christians are being deliberately and systematically expelled from educational and cultural institutions, prohibited from praying out loud in schools, barracks, public offices, and many private companies. Students are punished for entering class with a crucifix or a Bible. Christian charitable associations are conspicuously disadvantaged in the distribution of official funds, and Christian candidates for public office are vetoed because of their religion. While a continuous stream of anti-Christian propaganda floods bookstores, newspapers, and cinemas (The Body and The Da Vinci Code are just two of the most popular examples), some states have made the teaching of Islam and Native American religions mandatory in schools, punishing any overt Christian preference with mandatory “sensitivity reeducation” sessions that include hours of Quranic recitations or practice of indigenous rites. Since the civil rights law, no American minority community has suffered such broad, arrogant, and poorly disguised discrimination as that imposed on the Christian majority today.

The other sources mentioned provide confirmations to the first two, in a dose exceeding what even the slowest and most recalcitrant minds could demand.

Although they occur in opposite hemispheres, the two phenomena are interconnected. The cultural industry that uses all its power to foster prejudice against the Christian people within America itself would not want to alert them, at the same time, to the mortal danger looming over their co-religionists in Asia and Africa: they might see in it a foretaste of their own fate, as every genocide is always preceded by the destruction of the victim’s cultural defenses. The connection thus becomes obvious: without the active or passive, noisy or silent complicity of the anti-Christian establishment in the West, the dictators of China, Sudan, Vietnam, and North Korea could never continue killing Christians without being disturbed. The media’s discourse in favor of today’s privileged “minorities,” who in the USA have never suffered a fraction of the suffering imposed on Christians worldwide — a discourse always accompanied by at least implicit blame on Christianity — is itself an effective means of desensitizing the public to anti-Christian persecution.

The nightmare of entire peoples being slaughtered under the indifferent gaze of the world and the sarcastic smiles of the well-thought-out repeats itself, exactly as in the 1930s. Eight million Ukrainians threatened by Stalin might have survived if the New York Times had not assured they were in good hands. Six million Jews could have been spared if, in England, Mr. Chamberlain, in the USA, the communists bought by the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, and in France, a rotten Catholic left led by the sugary Emmanuel Mounier, had not guaranteed that Adolf Hitler was peaceful. The credibility of appeasers is a lethal weapon at the service of genocidists. But today it is not even necessary to deny the horror. No one knows it exists. The world has shrunk to the dimensions of a TV screen, a newspaper headline. What doesn’t fit in them is outside the universe. The elegant media has become the greatest instrument of control and manipulation ever conceived by the supreme tyrants. Joseph Goebbels and Willi Munzenberg were mere amateurs. They believed in ostensive propaganda, when it is now known that a simple discreet alteration of the news flow is enough to generate in the masses an unlimited trust in the manipulators and a fierce hatred for scapegoats, without anyone seeming to have induced them to it. The time of repeated lies is over. We have entered the era of total inversion.

For this very reason, saying so is useless. I know the Brazilian literate class well. I know that among them, especially among journalists, many will, upon simply reading this article, without the slightest temptation to consult the sources, deny everything a priori with a skeptical smirk and the infallible recourse to the pejorative stereotype of the “conspiracy theory.” They will be heard with approval as if they were the supreme authorities on the subject, and I will be deemed crazy. A world where affected mannerisms convince more than tons of evidence is beyond the possibility of being described even by the most powerful instruments of the art of satire. George Orwell, Karl Kraus, Eugène Ionesco, Franz Kafka, and even Alexander Zinoviev, a professor of mathematical logic who used the tools of his discipline to forge a language capable of literary representation of the total incongruity of Soviet life, would prefer to remain silent. Satire exists, after all, to portray human beings. It hovers above satanic stupidity, unable to descend far enough to describe it.

The War Against Religions

Diário do Comércio, January 23, 2006

Although since the French Revolution most militant violence has always originated in materialist ideologies and chosen the religious population as its preferred victim; although the persecution of Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and Jews has killed more people just in the period from 1917 to 1990 than all religious wars combined have killed throughout universal history; although in the last two decades the slaughter of Christians has returned to being routine in communist and Islamic countries, reaching 150,000 victims per year; although all these facts are easily proven and of public domain;⁶ and although in democratic nations themselves the accumulation of restrictive legislation exposes religious people to the constant danger of judicial persecution — the mainstream media and the education system in most countries insist on continuing to use language in which religion is synonymous with fanatical violence and in which the elimination of all religions is suggested, at least implicitly, as the most beautiful hope for peace and freedom for suffering humanity.

The enormous lie sustaining this campaign is so evident, so ostentatious, so cynical, that combating it only in the field of public discussions is the same as trying to stop a murderer, thief, or rapist by politely stating that their actions are illegal. The mentors and authors of the universal anti-religious campaign know perfectly well that they are lying. They don’t need to be told this. They need to be stopped, deprived of their means of aggression, rendered impotent, and made harmless like stuffed tigers.

Persistent propaganda against a community at risk is not mere expression of opinions: it is criminal action, it is overt or disguised complicity with genocide. Those who practice it should not be merely politely contested, as if it were just a peaceful debate of ideas: they should be held legally responsible for crimes against humanity. The accumulated jurisprudence around Nazi atrocities, unanimous in condemning even retroactive moral complicity, provides more than sufficient basis to condemn, for example, a Richard Dawkins when he loudly proclaims that Judaism and Christianity are “child abuse,” as if the very notion of child protection had not been brought into the world by these religions and as if they were not, today, the last obstacle to the total eroticization of childhood and the subsequent universal legalization of pedophilia (already practically institutionalized in Canada, one of the most atheist countries in the universe).

When Mr. Dawkins claims to be opposed to the use of violent means to extinguish religions but proposes the same atheistic goals that for two centuries have sought to be realized precisely by these means, he knows perfectly well that the emphasis of his speech, and therefore its effect on the audience, lies in promoting the ends, not the selection of means. Voltaire, when he shouted “crush the infamous thing,” denied inciting anyone to physical violence against the Catholic Church. But when the revolutionaries of 1789 went out burning convents, gutting nuns, and beheading bishops, it was this cry that echoed in their ears and came out of their mouths. If religion is, according to Mr. Dawkins, “the greatest of all crimes,” the slaughter of all religious people will always have the mitigating factor of lesser gravity and the sublime intention of liberation. When, at the beginning of the 20th century, Edouard Drumont wrote La France Juive, he had no cruelty in mind to be collectively practiced against the Jews. But it is impossible to read his pages today without smelling the gas chambers. A single brief vaguely anti-Semitic page written by Winston Churchill in his youth precipitated him into such a crisis of remorse at the rise of Nazism that it decided the rest of his life as a leader and fighter. Drumont, who died in 1917, could not have guessed the fate his readers would give to the Jews. But Mr. Dawkins does not need to guess the future to calculate the effect of his words: he knows the history of the 20th century; he knows to what results not only explicit proposals like Lenin’s “sweep Christianity from the face of the Earth” lead but also the more subtle, sophisticated anti-Christianism of a Heidegger, who, intending to expel God from metaphysics, summoned Adolf Hitler into history. The man who, knowing all this, volunteers to record TV programs presenting religion as the root of all evils, as if the broadest massacres in history were not evils at all, that man is simply an apologist for genocide, a vulgar criminal like any suburban neo-Nazi.

Mr. Dawkins has already crossed that threshold of mental brutality and contempt for truth, beyond which any discussion of ideas becomes useless. It is not a matter of proving anything to Mr. Dawkins. It is about proving his crime before the courts. His and those of countless militant organizations, subsidized by billionaire foundations, dedicated to fomenting hatred of religions by all means.

All religious organizations that do not mobilize for common defense not only in the media field but also in the judicial field should be considered traitors, collaborators, and sold to the enemy. And it is not surprising that they use the pretext of forgiveness and charity to legitimize their abominable cowardice, prostituting the meaning of the evangelical message that commands each of us to forgive the offenses committed against ourselves, never to show off as Christians by the easy expedient of forgiving crimes committed against others, who moreover never gave them a proxy for this. He is not a disciple of Jesus who, seeing his brother being slapped, hurries to court the aggressor by offering the other side of the victim.

Fundamentalism?

The most extraordinary thing is that the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish forces, barely hiding their support for the Islamic occupation of the Western world, use the bloody image of Islamic radicalism to project it onto all religious communities, especially those that are usual victims of Muslim violence, and convey to the world the notion that all are, at heart, terrorists. The cunning handling of the term “fundamentalism” has served this trick, which dishonors any cultured language. This term originally designated certain Protestant sects inclined to a literal reading of the Bible or, more generally, any religious community determined to maintain attachment to its traditions (a right today reserved for Muslims, Indians, Africans, and their descendants, denying it to all the rest of the human species). By transferring the use of this qualifier to Islamic terrorists, the mainstream media and the activist intellectuals who frequent it committed a deliberate impropriety. On the one hand, this use camouflaged the fact that these radicals were not at all traditionalists: they were revolutionaries deeply influenced by Western mass ideologies — communism and Nazism-fascism — as well as by the “avant-garde” thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and tutti quanti. On the other hand, and for this very reason, the term thus employed was magnetized with repugnant connotations, preparing its future use as a psychological warfare weapon against the same religious communities that Islamic radicalism took and takes as its preferred victims: Christians and Jews. In a third phase, the qualifier began to be used openly against these communities, while the anti-religious defamation campaign of which Mr. Richard Dawkins is now the most flamboyant poster boy spread around the world. During the invasion of Iraq, labeling President Bush (Christian) and Secretary Rumsfeld (Jewish) as “fundamentalists” suddenly became mandatory in all chic media, with a uniformity that proves, once again, the journalistic class’s readiness to collaborate with the Orwellian reform of vocabulary.

Crime Makeup Artists

Diário do Comércio, September 20, 2010

Lenin said that when you have taken away your adversary’s will to fight, you have already won the battle. But in modern conditions of “asymmetric warfare,” controlling public opinion has become more decisive than achieving victories on the military field. Lenin’s rule thus automatically converts into the technique of the “spiral of silence”: now it is about extinguishing, in the enemy’s soul, not only their fighting spirit but even their will to argue in their own defense, their mere impulse to say a few timid words against the aggressor.

The way to achieve this goal is laborious and expensive, but simple in essence: it is about attacking the honor of the unfortunate from so many sides, through so many diverse media, and with such a variety of contradictory allegations, often deliberately absurd and farcical, that he, feeling the impossibility of a clean debate, ends up preferring to retreat into silence. At that moment he becomes politically dead. Evil has won another battle.

The technique was first tried in the 18th century. The load of fabrications, mockery, urban legends, and parodies of historical-philological research thrown at the Catholic Church was so heavy that priests and theologians ended up thinking it wasn’t worth defending a venerable institution against such low and malicious allegations. Result: they lost the fight. The contrast between the virulence, baseness, ubiquity of anti-Catholic propaganda and the scarcity, timidity of defense or counter-attack speeches marked the image of the era, to this day, with the triumphant appearance of the Enlightenment thinkers and revolutionaries. Worse still: it covered them with the aura of intellectual superiority which, in the end, they did not possess at all. The Church continued teaching, healing souls, helping the poor, aiding the sick, producing saints and martyrs, but it was as if none of that had happened. To give you an idea of the numbing power of the “spiral of silence,” just note that during that period a single Catholic organization, the Society of Jesus, made more contributions to science than all its materialist detractors combined, but it was these detractors who went down in history—and remain there to this day—as champions of scientific reason in the fight against obscurantism. (If this statement seems strange and—as they say in Brazil—“controversial” to you, it’s because you continue to believe semi-literate teachers and semi-literate journalists. Instead, you should clear your doubt by reading John W. O’Malley and Mordecai Feingold.)⁷

It was only almost a century after these events that Alexis de Tocqueville discovered why the Church had lost a war it had everything to win. He is credited with the first formulation of the theory of the “spiral of silence,” which, in extensive research on public opinion behavior in Germany, Elizabeth Noëlle-Neumann fully confirmed in The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin.⁸ Remaining silent in the face of a dishonest attacker is as suicidal as trying to rebut their accusations in “high terms,” conferring upon them a dignity they do not possess. Both actions thrust you straight into the vortex of the “spiral of silence.” The Church of the 18th century made these two mistakes, just as today’s Church is making them again.

The dirtiness, the vileness of certain attacks are planned to embarrass the victim, instilling in them the repulsion of engaging in discussions that seem degrading and thus forcing them either into silence or into a display of superior cold politeness that cannot help but seem like a mere improvised camouflage of unbearable pain and, therefore, a confession of defeat. You cannot stop an assault by refusing to lay a finger on the assailant or by politely demonstrating that the Penal Code prohibits what they are doing.

The lessons of Tocqueville and Noëlle-Newmann are not only useful for the Catholic Church. Along with it, the most defamed communities in the universe are Americans and Jews. The former prefer to pay for crimes they did not commit rather than incur a lack of politeness against their most perverse detractors. The latter know how to defend themselves a little better but feel inhibited when the attackers come from their own ranks—which happens alarmingly often. No entity in the world has as many internal enemies as the Catholic Church, the USA, and the Jewish nation. They have lived in the “spiral of silence” for so long that they no longer know how to get out of it—and even foster it on their own initiative, anticipating their enemies.

The only effective reaction to the spiral of silence is to break it—and you cannot do that without also breaking, along with it, the image of respectability of those who manufactured it. But how to unmask a false respectability respectfully? How to denounce malice, trickery, lies, crime, without crossing the boundaries of mere “debate of ideas”? Those who commit crimes are not ideas: they are people. Nothing favors the empire of evil more than the fear of launching a “personal attack” when it is absolutely necessary. Aristotle taught that one cannot debate with those who do not recognize—or do not follow—the rules of the search for truth. Those who want to maintain an “elevated dialogue” with criminals become makeup artists of crime. They are the first ones who, in the impossibility of an honest debate and fearing to fall into the sin of “personal attack,” retreat to what they imagine to be an honorable silence, leaving the field to the enemy. The technique of the “spiral of silence” consists of inducing them to do precisely that.

Bad Adviser

Diário do Comércio, May 30, 2011

When reacting to the increasingly virulent attacks that religion suffers from gay activists, abortionists, enraged feminists, neocommunists, dazzled Enlightenment enthusiasts, etc., certain Catholics and Protestants invert the order of priorities: they put less effort into defeating the adversary than in avoiding, by all means, “fighting him in the manner of Olavo de Carvalho.” What they mean by this is that Olavo de Carvalho is violent, cruel, and ruthless, humiliating the enemy until he flees with his tail between his legs, whereas they, the very Christian, very pious, very good souls, prefer to “hate the sin, never the sinner.” Hence, instead of hurting the malicious with the red-hot iron of ugly truth, they prefer to admonish them in a tone of fraternal correction or, at most, argue generically in terms of rights and values.

First, they are terrible readers of the Bible. Christ, it is true, commanded to hate the sin and not the sinner. But this refers to sentiment, to intimate motivation, not to the mildness or harshness of acts and expressed words. He never said it is possible to repress sin without hurting, opposing, and, in the most obstinate cases, humiliating the sinner. When He expelled the merchants from the temple, did He whip “sins” or the bodies of the sinners? When He called the unbelievers a "brood of vipers,"⁹ was He addressing abstract notions in the air, or human ears that felt the pain of humiliation? When He said that the child molester should be thrown into the sea with a stone around his neck, was He referring to the neck of the sin or that of the sinner? Sin, not only in these particular cases but in all possible and imaginable cases, can only be repressed, punished, or fought in the person of the sinner, not in itself and abstractly. Talking generically about sin without doing anything against the agent who practices it is to transform morality into a matter of mere theory, without practical reach.

Secondly, they lack moral discernment. They do not have it, at least, to the extent necessary to assess the relative gravity of private and public acts, nor to distinguish between the passion of the flesh and the open, demonic hatred of the Holy Spirit.

More imbued with bourgeois sexual moralism than with authentic evangelical inspiration, they abominate, to the same extent, the homosexual practice itself and its use as a public instrument of deliberate offense to Jesus, the Church, and all that is sacred. They do not know the difference between carnal temptation, which is human, and the impulse to humiliate Christendom, which is satanic. They speak of one thing and the other in the same tone, as if the sin against the Holy Spirit were as forgivable as a weakness of the flesh, a slip, any vice. Acting thus, they place themselves in a logically unsustainable position. Feeling their own vulnerability without clearly perceiving where the weak point is, they waver, tremble, and begin to soften their discourse as if asking the adversary for permission to be what they are, to believe in what they believe. Hence comes their servile fear of “fighting in the manner of Olavo de Carvalho,” the compulsion to distance themselves from someone who is not inhibited by the same fragility of heart.

It is true that Olavo de Carvalho sometimes uses harsh, depressing, humiliating words. But he has never raised his voice in public to condemn any private conduct, however abominable it seemed to him. Private sins are spoken of in private, with discretion, prudence, compassion. They can also be spoken of in public, but generically, without pointing fingers at anyone. And the tone, in such a circumstance, should be of pedagogical exhortation, not accusation. Examine Olavo de Carvalho’s conduct and say if he ever strayed from these norms. When he humiliates the sinner in public, it is always for public sins, which never stem from a mere personal weakness but from a rational, premeditated, malicious cultural or political action down to the core.

Homosexuality is one thing, the gay movement is another. The first is a sin of the flesh, the second is an organized, politically armed, fierce, and systematic affront to the dignity of the Church and God Himself — something that goes far beyond even atheistic propaganda, as the latter consists of mere words and the former of acts of power. Acts of arrogance, calculated to humiliate, intimidate, and debase, paving the way for physical aggression, police repression, and slaughter. The ultimate cynicism of these people is to loudly whine about public violence against gays, statistically negligible, and allege it precisely against the most persecuted and threatened community in the universe, which has already provided some hundreds of millions of victims to the bloody rituals of the builders of “better worlds.” The individual who has allowed himself to be corrupted to the point of engaging in this exercise of psychotic mendacity with the good conscience of serving a humanitarian cause is far from being able to be reached, in his soul, by moral exhortations, appeals to “freedom of religion,” complaints formulated in academic debate powder language or even wonderfully well-founded rational arguments. Only one thing can inhibit him: the fear of public humiliation, which, in the souls of charlatans and hypocrites, is always exacerbated and sometimes their only sensitive point.

Yes, Olavo de Carvalho sometimes uses brutal words. But he does so out of pedagogical premeditation, which excludes, by hypothesis, any passionate motivation, especially hatred, whereas others only avoid using these words because they are afraid of seeming evil, because they dread giving a bad impression and seek refuge under a cloak of good-boyism, perfectly misplaced evangelical excuses, thus competing in falsehood and hypocrisy with the leaders of gay activism.

They commit, moreover, the same suicidal mistake that Brazilian liberals fell into two decades ago, when, fleeing Olavo de Carvalho’s example, they preferred to debate market economics with the PT members instead of denouncing the São Paulo Forum and its innumerable list of crimes. Today they are finished. Cowardice is always a bad counselor.

The Fight No One Wants to Pick

Diário do Comércio, April 12, 2010

At any given moment, the general state of a society is indicated by a series of measurable and comparable factors, such as average income, crime rates, school performance, the number of marriages and divorces, etc.

Comparing these factors allows for the assessment of the relative importance of each fact—or series of facts—in the context of social life. For example, the number of crimes and victims distributed across various regions, social groups, and age brackets. General knowledge of this picture awakens in the population a sense of proportions that serves as a measure for evaluating the credibility of circulating opinions. Beyond personal and group preferences, the factual core known by all is the final court in which ideas and proposals will be judged according to their adequacy or inadequacy to reality.

Now, there is only one channel through which the knowledge of the general picture can reach the population: the media. The normal and healthy performance of this function by newspapers depends not only on their ability to disseminate facts but also on selecting and giving them more or less prominence according to their real importance in that comparative picture, so that the focuses of public attention are hierarchized according to the objective importance of the factors.

In every society, there are a certain number of scholars who have access to direct sources and do not depend on popular media to form their vision of things. For the general population, however, a sort of circular movement prevails: the consistency and prominence with which facts are reported in the media become the standard for judging subsequent facts disseminated by the same media. In short, the media create their own rule of credibility, with no other reference frame available to the majority of the population by which this credibility can be judged.

Until the 1950s-60s, each media outlet in this country, despite the multiplicity of interests it had to attend to, remained reasonably submissive to the objective order of factors, knowing that very visible exaggerations or distortions would be exposed by their competitors the next day. To a certain extent, the overall image of society as it appeared in newspapers coincided with the actual quantitative picture: what deserved prominence and continued coverage was what, in social life, had some objective importance.

Four factors contributed to freeing the national media from these scruples of realism.

The first was the greater solidarity among companies, forged during the military regime for common defense against government impositions. Mutual denunciations of fraud and poor journalism almost completely disappeared, placing each journalistic company in the comfortable position of being able to lie without fear of reprisals from competitors. To the same extent, market competition practically ceased, with readers being more or less evenly distributed among the major publications.

The second was the diversification of the profitable activities of journalistic companies, which began to depend less and less on reader approval. The ultimate proof of this transformation is that these companies became significantly richer and more powerful without their newspaper circulation increasing in the slightest. With increasing education, the number of potential readers rose year by year, but the major Brazilian newspapers do not sell more copies today than they did in the 1950s. It is a unique phenomenon in world journalism.

Thirdly, the requirement of a university degree promoted the cultural and ideological uniformity of the journalistic class, so that there are no longer substantive differences between the climates of opinion in the various newspaper and magazine offices. In the general homogeneity, individual exceptions become irrelevant.

Lastly, the intellectual influences that came to dominate journalism schools, undermining confidence in the old criteria of objectivity and emphasizing instead the role of journalists as “agents of social transformation,” ultimately turned newsrooms en masse into militant groups imbued with a political-cultural agenda and willing to implement it by any means. That is why, out of thousands of media professionals who concealed the existence of the São Paulo Forum for sixteen years, only one, just one, showed any remorse. The others, including the self-appointed guardians of journalistic morality, preferred to retroactively conceal the concealment—and did not lose a minute’s sleep over it.

Added to all this is a fifth factor of international dimensions: the tremendous development in recent decades of social engineering techniques and their application by the media.

Who can prevent mutually supportive companies, freed even from the fear of the public, with a well-trained mass of “world transformers” at their service and a set of action instruments as discreet as they are efficient, from throwing all sense of objective proportions to the winds and engaging in the creation of a “second reality,” a newly invented order of factors, legitimizing in advance any new lie they might decide to distribute tomorrow or the day after?

Under these conditions, every presumption of “journalistic objectivity,” personified or not in this modern version of the court jester known as the ombudsman, has become today merely an advertising adornment without any real efficacy in newsroom practices.

The total disregard for quantitative criteria in determining the importance of news has thus become the usual and commonplace norm in all major publications. Without an external standard of measurement by which journalism can be judged, newspapers have come to live on a self-consuming and uniform news cycle, all publishing the same things with equal prominence, confirming each other in a common self-deception.

There is not a single newspaper or major magazine, for example, that gauges the prominence given to accusations against pedophile priests by comparing them with similar cases in other social groups. Such an examination would show, beyond any possibility of doubt, that the number of crimes is much, much lower among Catholic priests than in any other human community, although the prominence given in the media to these cases leads the population to believe otherwise. In a recent article,¹⁰ Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne showed that over several decades, only one hundred priests were reported and convicted in Italy, while six thousand physical education teachers were convicted of the same crime. Introvigne cited physical education teachers merely as a control group. He could have mentioned dozens of others:¹¹ in total, cases of pedophile priests would reveal themselves to be the rarities they are, dramatically contrasting with the alarming spread of pedophilia in society at large. I myself, examining the statistics trumpeted by the anti-clerical campaign in Ireland and drawing the arithmetic conclusions that the authors of the malicious document refused to draw, showed that in each Catholic school in that country, there was no more than one case of pedophilia every sixteen years. Calling this, as the media do, “epidemic pedophilia” is obviously a fraud, but how can the population perceive it if it has no other comparative criterion than the one provided by the media itself according to a politically interested agenda?

Mutatis mutandis, the number and severity of occurrences among the Legionaries of Christ are so much greater than those of cases recorded in any other Catholic institution that dealing with them without highlighting the difference, reducing them instead to examples of “Catholic pedophilia” like any other, is to completely falsify the view of the facts.

One thing is the reality of social life, another is its image in the media and public debates. The latter can be very removed from the former, causing public attention to alienate from reality to the point where the population becomes incapable of understanding what is happening. Complete displacement signals a state of social psychosis.

Massimo Introvigne is right to say that the campaign against the Catholic Church under the pretext of pedophilia accusations is a case of “moral panic.” But sociology only deals with general, impersonal, anonymous factors. It is not its place to trace historical origins or probe the coefficient of premeditation and criminal planning in the production of these phenomena. Only historical, judicial, and, of course, journalistic investigation can elucidate this point and identify the culprits behind one of the most extensive and perfidious slander campaigns of all time. Today there is enough documentation for this. What is lacking, including within the Catholic Church, is the will to pick this fight.

One Hundred Years of Pedophilia

O Globo, April 27, 2002

In Greece and the Roman Empire, the use of minors for the sexual satisfaction of adults was a tolerated and even valued custom. In China, castrating boys to sell them to wealthy pederasts was a legitimate trade for millennia. In the Islamic world, the rigid morals governing relations between men and women were often compensated by tolerance towards homosexual pedophilia. In some countries, this lasted until at least the beginning of the 20th century, making Algeria, for example, a garden of delights for depraved travelers (read André Gide’s memoirs, Si le grain ne meurt).

Everywhere that the practice of pedophilia receded, it was the influence of Christianity — and practically only that — which liberated children from this terrible yoke.

But this came at a price. It is as if an underground current of hatred and resentment has run through two millennia of history, waiting for the moment of revenge. That moment has arrived.

The movement to induce pedophilia begins when Sigmund Freud creates a caricatured eroticized version of the early years of human life, a version that is easily absorbed by the culture of the century. Since then, family life has increasingly appeared in the Western imagination as a pressure cooker of repressed desires. In cinema and literature, children seem to have nothing else to do but spy on their parents' sexual lives through the keyhole or indulge in the most astonishing erotic games themselves.

The politically explosive potential of the idea is quickly exploited by Wilhelm Reich, a communist psychiatrist who organizes a movement in Germany for the “sexual liberation of youth,” later transferred to the USA, where it becomes perhaps the main driving force behind the student rebellions of the sixties.

Meanwhile, the Kinsey Report, which we now know was a complete fraud,¹² demolishes the image of parental respectability, portraying parents to new generations as sexually sick hypocrites or hidden libertines.

The advent of the pill and the condom, which governments start to distribute happily in schools, sounds like the call for the general liberation of child and adolescent eroticism. Since then, the eroticization of childhood and adolescence has expanded from academic and literary circles to the culture of the middle and lower classes, through an infinity of films, TV programs, “encounter groups,” family counseling courses, advertisements, and more. Sex education in schools becomes a direct induction of children and young people to practice everything they see in movies and TV.

But up until then, the legitimization of pedophilia appears only insinuated, smuggled in the midst of general demands that encompass it as an implicit consequence.

In 1981, however, Time reports that pro-pedophilia arguments are gaining popularity among sexual counselors. Larry Constantine, a family therapist, proclaims that children “have the right to express themselves sexually, which means they can or cannot have sexual contacts with older people.” One of the authors of the Kinsey Report, Wardell Pomeroy, pontificates that incest “can sometimes be beneficial.”

Under the pretext of combating discrimination, representatives of the gay movement are authorized to teach in kindergartens the benefits of homosexual practice. Anyone who opposes them is stigmatized, persecuted, fired. In a book praised by J. Elders, former US Surgeon General (the same one who issues apocalyptic warnings against cigarettes), journalist Judith Levine claims that pedophiles are harmless and that a boy’s sexual relationship with a priest can even be a beneficial thing. The real danger, says Levine, are the parents, who project “their fears and their own desire for child flesh onto the mythical child molester.”

Feminist organizations help to disarm children against pedophiles and arm them against the family, disseminating the monstrous theory of an Argentine psychiatrist according to which at least one in every four girls is raped by her own father.

The highest consecration of pedophilia comes in a 1998 issue of the Psychological Bulletin, an organ of the American Psychological Association. The magazine asserts that sexual abuse in childhood “does not cause intense harm pervasively,” and even recommends that the term pedophilia, “laden with negative connotations,” be changed to “intergenerational intimacy.”

It would be unthinkable that such a vast mental revolution, spreading throughout society, would miraculously spare a special part of the public: priests and seminarians. In their case, an external pressure combined with a special stimulus, well calculated to act from within. In a recent book, Goodbye, Good Men, American reporter Michael S. Rose shows that for three decades, gay organizations in the USA have been placing their people in the psychology departments of seminaries to hinder the entry of vocationally gifted postulants and force the massive admission of homosexuals into the clergy. In the main seminaries, homosexual propaganda has become ostentatious and heterosexual students have been forced by their superiors to engage in homosexual conduct.

Cornered and sabotaged, confused and induced, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, many priests and seminarians will end up yielding to the general infanto-juvenile debauchery. And, when that happens, all the spokespeople of modern “liberated” culture, the entire “progressive” establishment, all the “advanced” media, all the forces, in short, that over a hundred years have stripped children of the protective aura of Christianity to deliver them to the lust of perverse adults, suddenly rejoice, because they have found an innocent on whom to cast their guilt. A hundred years of pedophile culture, suddenly, are absolved, cleansed, redeemed before the Most High: the only one to blame for everything is… clerical celibacy! Christianity is now going to pay for all the evil it prevented them from doing.

Make no mistake: the Church is accused and humiliated because it is innocent. Its detractors accuse it because they themselves are guilty. Never has René Girard’s theory of the persecution of the scapegoat as an expedient for restoring the illusory unity of a community in crisis found such clear, obvious, universal, and simultaneous confirmation.

Anyone who does not perceive this at this moment is divorced from their own conscience. They have eyes but do not see, have ears but do not hear.

But the Church itself, if instead of denouncing its attackers it prefers to bow to them in a grotesque act of contrition, sacrificing pro forma a few pedophile priests to avoid facing the forces that injected them like a virus, will have made its most disastrous choice in the last two millennia.

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1. John, 18:19-23 passim.↩

2. Editor’s Note: The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, signed in August 1939 by the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov.↩

3. Dallas: Word Publishing, 1997.↩

4. Washington: Regnery, 2003.↩

5. In order, http://www.religioustolerance.org/rt_overv.htm; http://www.freedomhouse.org; http://www.markswatson.com/Persecution.html; http://www.persecution.org/newsite/.↩

6. Sources on anti-religious persecution: 1) Books: David Limbaugh, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity (Washington, Regnery, 2003); Roy Moore, So Help Me God: The Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny, and The Battle for Religious Freedom (Nashville, Tennessee, Broadman & Holman, 2005); Janet L. Folger, The Criminalization of Christianity (Systers, Oregon, Multnomah, 2005); Rabbi David G. Dalin, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope (Washington DC, Regnery, 2005); David B. Barrett & Todd Johnson, World Christian Trends, Ad 30-Ad 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus (William Carey Library, Send the Light Inc, 2003); E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend, Indiana, St. Augustine’s Press, 2000). 2) Internet: http://www.christianpersecution.info/; http://zbh.com/links/martyred.htm; http://www.freedomhouse.org/religion/; http://www.christianmonitor.org/; http://www.worship.com/help/; http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/state.htm; http://www.thegreatseparation.com/newsfront/christian_persecution/; http://www.persecution.com/; http://www.jews4fairness.org/index.php; http://www.wnd.com (general information site, regularly follows news of religious persecution worldwide).↩

7. Respectively, The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and The Arts, 1540-1773 (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1999) and Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).↩

8. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.↩

9. Editor’s Note: For an idea of the vocabulary used by Jesus Christ and the Catholic saints in such cases, see the list “Cursing with the Saints — Insults for Catholics with Testosterone,” available at the link: http://advhaereses.blogspot.com.br/2010/09/xingando-com-os-santos.html; and Olavo de Carvalho’s article “Concurso Santo Palavrão: o prêmio é meu,” from July 21, 2011, at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/110721concurso.html. Here is a quote appreciated by the author: “But if they profane the faith by their works and do not hide, covered in shame, underground, why do they get irritated with us, who condemn with words what they manifest with actions?” (Saint John Chrysostom).↩

10. Editor’s Note: “Pedophile Priests: A Moral Panic” (“Preti Pedofili: un panico morale”), by Massimo Introvigne. Original version in Italian at the link: http://www.cesnur.org/2010/mi_preti_pedofili.html; and in PDF, translated into Portuguese by Miguel Nagib, at the link: www.deuslovult.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Padres-pedofilos-panico-moral.pdf?9d7bd4.↩

11. Editor’s Note: “For now the cup [of record holder for pedophiles per capita] seems to be with that class self-appointed to watch over, in place of the old clergy, the protection and moral formation of the world’s children: UN social workers. In 2001 alone, according to data from the entity’s own secretariat-general, there were 400 complaints from families of West African refugees against these multinational child molesters. Four hundred episodes in one year, in a single community, unequivocally configure a case of mass pedophilia. And with the particularly repugnant detail: the victims were not taken from the streets or schools but from the masses of the miserable, hungry, and sick who, in the extreme of despair, entrusted themselves to the hands of these monsters, believing in their promise of aid. This is indeed a scandal of global proportions, a crime against humanity in the strictest sense in which this expression was defined at Nuremberg. But UN social workers are untouchable. They are the new clergy, tasked with spreading the ‘politically correct’ gospel of tomorrow’s humanity” Olavo de Carvalho, “Monstrous Farce,” Jornal da Tarde, May 9, 2002 —http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/05092002jt.htm.↩

12. Editor’s Note: “(...) Alfred Kinsey, the charlatan (and part-time pedophile) who deceived half the country by interviewing sexual criminals about their practices and then trumpeting the answers as if they came from the average population” Olavo de Carvalho, “American Madness,” editorial in the Diário do Comércio, April 20, 2006: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/060420dce.html].↩