From the hearts of the mothers to the hearts of the children: Dona Lucilia Ribeiro dos Santos
This article is part of the book: The Crusader of the 20th Century: Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, by Roberto de Mattei, Gracewing (England), 1998, Preface by Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler
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Lucilia Ribeiro dos Santos, Mother of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, founder of the TFP, was born on 22 April 1876 in Pirassununga, in the State of São Paulo - Brazil, the second of five children. Her childhood was spent in quiet domestic surroundings in a small house in the exclusive neighbourhood of Campos Eliseos. Here, at the age of thirty, Lucilia met and married the lawyer João Paulo Corrêa de Oliveira, who had moved to São Paulo from the Northeast of Brazil, perhaps at the suggestion of his uncle, the councillor João Alfredo.
While Dona Lucilia awaited Plinio’s birth, her physician told her the delivery would be risky and that it was probable that either she or the child would die. He asked if she would not prefer therefore to abort, thus avoiding risking her life. Dona Lucilia answered in a calm but firm manner: “Doctor, this is not a question one asks a mother! It should not even have crossed your mind.”
This act of heroism shows the virtue of a lifetime. Cannon Trochu writes: “Virtue easily passes from the hearts of mothers to the hearts of their children.” Educated by a courageous and strong Christian mother — Father Lacordaire wrote about his mother — religion passed from her heart into mine, like milk that is virginal and devoid of bitterness”. In the same way Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira recalled that he owed Dona Lucilia the spiritual stamp that marked his life from his infancy:
“My mother taught me to love Our Lord Jesus Christ, she taught me to love the Holy Catholic Church.”
“I received from her something to be taken in a profoundly serious way, the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Faith, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to Our Lady.”
At a time when Leo XIII had exhorted people to place in the Heart of Jesus “all hope, and from it salvation is to be confidently besought”, the devotion that characterized the life of Dona Lucilia was that to the Sacred Heart, the devotion par excellence of modern times. There was a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart not far from the home of the Ribeiro dos Santos. The young mother used to go there every day bringing Plinio and Rosée with her. It was here, while observing his mother in prayer amidst the supernatural atmosphere characteristic of the churches of old, that the vision of the Church which deeply marked him, was formed in Plinio’s spirit. He would recall: “I perceived that her way of being came from her devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, through Our Lady.”
Dona Lucilia always remained faithful to the devotion of her youth. In the last years of her life, when she no longer had the strength to go to church, she used to spend long hours in prayer, until late at night, before an alabaster statue of the Sacred Heart enthroned in the main hall of her apartment.
The dominant note of Dona Lucilia’s soul was that of piety and mercy. Her soul was marked by an immense capacity for affection, goodness and a maternal love that was projected beyond the two children she had received from Providence. Plinio used to say: “She possessed tenderness to a great degree: she was most affectionate as a daughter, most affectionate as a sister, most affectionate as a wife, most affectionate as a mother, as a grandmother and even as a great-grandmother. But, I have the impression that there is something in her that gives the tonic note of all these affections: it is because she is, above all, a mother! She possessed an overflowing love not only for the two children she had, but also for the children she did not have. One would say she was made to have millions of children, and her heart beat with the desire to know them.”
Those who never knew Dona Lucilia can perceive her moral physiognomy through the image passed on in some expressive photographs and through the testimonies of those who remember her in her old age. She represented the model of a perfect lady who would have charmed a St Francis of Sales in his search for Philothea.
We can imagine that Dona Lucilia educated Plinio with the words that St Francis of Sales addressed to his brother, accompanying him one evening to a party: “Soyons distingués ad majorem Dei gloriam.”
The perfection of good manners is the fruit of an ascesis that can only be achieved by an education distilled over centuries and by a virtuous effort, such as is often found in contemplative convents, where a princely education is given to the young novices. After all, man is made up of body and soul. The life of his soul is destined to be noticeably manifested through that of his body, charity to be expressed in external acts of courtesy. Courtesy is a social rite nourished by Christian charity, directed to the glory of God. “Courtesy is to charity as the liturgy is to prayer: the rite that expresses it, the action that embodies it, the pedagogy that encourages it. Courtesy is the liturgy of brotherly charity.”
Lucilia Ribeiro dos Santos embodied the best spirit of the old Paulista aristocracy. In the oldfashioned kindness of his mother, an expression of her supernatural charity, the young Plinio saw a Christian love taken to extreme consequences and a similar radical repulsion for the modern and revolutionary world that was being established. From then on, the aristocratic attitude and pleasantness of manner was a constant in his life. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, who in his ways reminded one of Cardinal Merry del Val, the great Secretary of State of St Pius X famous for his humility of soul and the perfection of his good manners, was magnificently capable of being in society. His behaviour was exemplary, his conversation inexhaustible and fascinating.
Providence arranged that this maternal stamp would be nourished and renewed by a daily life together that lasted until 1968, when Dona Lucilia died at the age of 92.