SUNLIT UPLANDS: Liberation Theology

Quo vadis, Domine? Reverent and Filial Message to His Holiness Pope Francis from Prince Bertrand of Orleans-Braganza

HRH Prince Bertrand of Orleans-Braganza

From the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property

Editors Note: Activists from movements that obstinately and violently subvert private property were recently invited to attend meetings with important organizations of the Holy See. One of these activists was actually received by the Pontiff himself. In face of these and other developments, Prince Bertrand of Orleans-Braganza expressed his perplexity and concern in a reverent and filial letter to Pope Francis.

Fully cognizant of what a communist South America will mean for the United States and the world, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property--TFP translated Prince Bertrand's Open Letter and is making it available to the general public.

I address Your Holiness in my twofold capacity as Prince of the Imperial House of Brazil and an active participant in the public life of my country to express a serious concern about the Catholic cause in Brazil and in South America in general.

Brazilians are largely aware that it was thanks to the entreaties of Pope Leo XIII, and in spite of the serious political drawbacks that such a decision would entail, that my great grandmother, Princess Isabel, Regent of the Empire, signed the Golden Law, on May 13, 1888, definitively abolishing slavery in Brazil. That action cost her the throne, but earned her the title of “the Redemptrix” in Brazilian history; and for it she received a Golden Rose from the Pope as a reward for her selflessness in favor of social harmony and the rights of the underprivileged.

Moved by the same sense of justice and dedication to the common good as my ancestors, I am honored to have founded and assisted for these last ten years the Peace in the Countryside campaign,^[1] promoting social harmony in Brazilian agriculture. This task is all the more necessary since the country’s rural areas have been thrown into convulsion over the last few decades by a series of land invasions, attacks, destruction of crops, confiscatory expropriations, outlandish environmental requirements, and legal insecurity.

At the core of this agrarian agitation—which is the main obstacle to the full development of Brazilian agriculture and cattle ranching, responsible for 37% of Brazil’s jobs^[2] and about half of all new jobs in the first semester of 2013^[3]—are found the Landless Workers Movement, better known by its Portuguese acronym, MST, and the international organization, La Via Campesina.

1. MST National Leader Uses Vatican Seminar as a Podium to Instigate Class Struggle

For this reason, it was with consternation that I learned that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences invited Mr. João Pedro Stédile, MST national coordinator and representative of Via Campesina, to participate as an observer in its seminar on The Emergence of the Socially Excluded, which was held in Rome on December 5, 2013, and with travel expenses paid for by the Vatican, as the beneficiary himself acknowledged.

João Pedro Stédile, MST national coordinator and representative of Via Campesina.

This consternation has spread in Catholic circles, since the well-known MST agitator used the event as a tribune to promote his erroneous principles and false solutions based on the Marxist premise of class struggle and on the utopia of a collectivist society, a clearly foreseeable fact.

Indeed, just two days after the symposium was held on Vatican premises, Mr. Stédile addressed activists from the ultra-leftist Italian Altermondialista movement, in a vacant theater building they have occupied in Rome. In his talk, reproduced by the Adista News Agency,^[4] he boasted about his illegal methods. He acknowledged that “the institutional path to change appears decisively blocked,” and that, “all that the MST has conquered over its 30-year life is due to the practice of mass occupations,” in other words, the systematic violation of private property in the countryside.

According to Stédile, the MST’s need to use illegal means stems from the fact that “in the present historic context the balance of forces on the level of class struggle is quite unfavorable to the working classes”—that is to say, unfavorable to the leftist movements that usurp worker representation.

Stédile even admits that “the world lives a period of reflux of the mass movement” that affects the MST itself because “the conditions for class struggle have become more difficult: the masses have perceived the impossibility of a victory and are turning back.”