Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

Who was Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira?

Plinio Correa de Oliveira was a Brazilian intellectual, politician and Catholic activist.

His mother, Lucilia Corrêa de Oliveira, was a devout Roman Catholic. He was educated by Jesuits. In 1928 he joined the Marian Congregations of São Paulo and soon became a leader of that organization, often giving speeches. In 1933 he helped organize the Catholic Electoral League and was elected to the nation’s Constitutional Convention. As the youngest congressman in Brazil's history he was part of the "Catholic bloc".

He assumed the chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. He was also the first president of the São Paulo Archdiocesan Board of Catholic Action.

From 1935 to 1947 he served as director of the Catholic weekly Legionário. In 1951 he began his direction of the monthly paper Catolicismo. From 1968 to 1990 he wrote a column for the Folha de São Paulo, the city’s largest daily newspaper. He opposed communism and Catholic leftism in Latin America.

An admirer of Thomas Aquinas, he was the author of 15 books and over 2,500 essays and articles. His works include: In Defense of Catholic Action, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, The Church and the Communist State: The Impossible Coexistence, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII, and many others.