Student: "It's Kind of Tyrannical!"

Volunteers from TFP Student Action Europe travelled across the Netherlands to counter the widespread consensus created by the extreme left. With a relatively small but committed group, we entered the public arena, this time in Hilversum.

After reciting the Nicene Creed and praying the Holy Rosary, some volunteers engaged passers-by to condemn the sin of abortion and refute popular falsehoods that are propagated to stigmatise the pro-life movement and Catholics in general. Slogans such as 'my body, my choice', 'it's a woman's issue' and 'it's not a baby, it's a fetus' are seen as dogmas that cannot be challenged. But we don't allow them to gain ground and create a mentality that prevents us from realizing our goals.

‘”But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil.” Matthew 5:37

The Revolutionary Counteroffensive

As explained by the founder of TFP in Brasil and the inspirer for all other TFP's and like-minded organisations throughout the world, Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira:

As a rule, the revolutionary is petulant, verbose, and strutting when he has no or only weak adversaries to face him. However, if someone proudly and daringly confronts him, he grows quiet and organizes a campaign of silence. One perceives amid the silence, however, the discreet buzz of calumny or some murmuring against the “excessive logic” of his adversary. But it is a confused and shamed silence that is never broken by any worthwhile rejoinder. In face of this silence of confusion and defeat, we could say to the victorious counter-revolutionary the spirited words written by Veuillot on a certain occasion: “Question the silence, and no answer will it make."

“That’s Kind of Tyrannical!”

After a discussion with a Dutch student in front of the station, the dilemma was raised as to whether abortion is still the right to do what you want with your own life. Is it allowed to forbid a person to make their own choices? The pro-lifer explained how the current culture does not aim to give 'freedom' to everyone, but how it actually promotes unregulated freedom to practice vice and sin and prevents good; to outlaw moral judgement.

The question can be asked whether we can have a certain aggressiveness or combativeness towards our enemies, the revolutionaries. Is it forbidden for Catholics to refute someone in public? To defend their faith and their moral convictions? In fact, we should strive for a public reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ in all facets of society. Our contemporary society is not only dominated by the Revolution, but it is born out of a century-long revolt against Christendom.

Characteristics of This Crisis

However profound the factors that diversify this crisis from country to country, it always has five major characteristics.

1. It Is Universal

This crisis is universal. There is no people that is not affected by it to a greater or lesser degree.

2. It Is One

This crisis is one. It is not a range of crises developing side by side, independently in each country, interrelated because of certain analogies of varying relevance.

When a fire breaks out in a forest, one cannot regard it as a thousand autonomous and parallel fires of a thousand trees in close proximity. The unity of the phenomenon of combustion acts on the living unity that is the forest. Moreover, the great force of expansion of the flames results from the heat in which the innumerable flames of the different trees intermingle and multiply. Indeed, everything helps to make the forest fire a single fact, totally encompassing the thousand partial fires, however different from one another in their accidents.

Western Christendom constituted a single whole that transcended the several Christian countries without absorbing them. A crisis occurred within this living unity, eventually affecting the whole through the combined and even fused heat of the ever more numerous local crises that across the centuries have never ceased to intertwine and augment one another. Consequently, Christendom, as a family of officially Catholic states, has long ceased to exist. The Western and Christian peoples are mere remnants of it. And now they are all agonizing under the action of this same evil.

3. It Is Total

In any given country, this crisis develops in such a profound level of problems that it spreads or unfolds, by the very order of things, in all powers of the soul, all fields of culture, and, in the end, all realms of human action.

4. It Is Dominant

Considered superficially, the events of our days seem a chaotic and inextricable tangle. From many points of view, they are indeed.

However, one can discern profoundly consistent and vigorous resultants of this conjunction of so many disorderly forces when considering them from the standpoint of the great crisis we are analyzing.

Indeed, under the impulse of these forces in delirium, the Western nations are being gradually driven toward a state of affairs which is taking the same form in all of them and is diametrically opposed to Christian civilization.

Thus, this crisis is like a queen whom all the forces of chaos serve as efficient and docile vassals.

5. It Is Processive

This crisis is not a spectacular, isolated episode. It constitutes, on the contrary, a critical process already five centuries old. It is a long chain of causes and effects that, having originated at a certain moment with great intensity in the deepest recesses of the soul and the culture of Western man, has been producing successive convulsions since the fifteenth century. The words of Pius XII about a subtle and mysterious enemy of the Church can fittingly be applied to this process:

“It is to be found everywhere and among everyone; it can be both violent and astute. In these last centuries, it has attempted to disintegrate the intellectual, moral, and social unity in the mysterious organism of Christ. It has sought nature without grace, reason without faith, freedom without authority, and, at times, authority without freedom. It is an “enemy” that has become more and more apparent with an absence of scruples that still surprises: Christ yes; the Church no! Afterwards: God yes; Christ no! Finally the impious shout: God is dead and, even, God never existed! And behold now the attempt to build the structure of the world on foundations which we do not hesitate to indicate as the main causes of the threat that hangs over humanity: economy without God, law without God, politics without God.[1]” ( Pius XII, allocution to the Union of Men of the Italian Catholic Action on October 12 1952, Discorsi e radiomessagi di Sua Santita Pio XII (Vatican: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1953), vol. 14, p. 359.)

This process should not be viewed as an altogether fortuitous sequence of causes and effects that has taken place unexpectedly. Already at its inception, this crisis was strong enough to carry out all its potentialities. It is still strong enough to cause, by means of supreme upheavals, the ultimate destructions that are its logical outcome.

Influenced and conditioned in different ways by all sorts of extrinsic factors (cultural, social, economic, ethnic, geographic, and others), it follows paths that are sinuous at times. It nonetheless never ceases to progress toward its tragic end.

In Defense of the Highest Interests of the Catholic Cause and Christian Civilization

TFP Student Action - Europe is the student sector formed by young volunteers from several European TFPs - Societies for the Defense of Tradition, Family, Property.

Networking with thousands of concerned students and parents, TFP Student Action defends traditional moral values on college campuses, schools, and in the streets, in direct contact with the public.

Inspired by the teachings of the Holy Catholic Church, TFP volunteers are on the front lines of the culture war, working to restore the values of Christian civilization.

Currently present in 13 European countries, our volunteers maintain weekly training programs in various fields (cultural, historical, religious, etc.), with a view to the ideological struggle in defense of Christian Civilization.

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