Holy intransigence

By Roberto de Mattei   |   4 December 2024

Intransigence is the firmness with which one defends one’s ideas. It is holy when these ideas are religious; not of any religion, but of the true one, founded by Jesus Christ, God-Man, Redeemer of the human race. The greatest intransigence that can be imagined is expressed by the dogmas of the Catholic Church, which are so true as to be defined as infallible.

To defend the name of Christ and His teaching, countless Christians have faced persecution, suffering and death throughout history. The martyrs were witnesses of Christ, the only Way, Truth and Life (cf. Jn 14:6). In the age of the Roman Empire, as in that of relativism today, it was held that all religions should be seen as equal. In the ancient pantheon, all religions had to be subordinated to the cult of the goddess Roma; in the modern pantheon, they must be subordinated to the cult of relativism, which, denying every religion the right to be defined as absolutely true, proclaims them all false. For this reason, modern society can be described as intrinsically atheist, even if the dictatorship of relativism does not yet extend to the bloody persecutions of the first centuries of the Church.

Those who fully embrace the philosophy of relativism are a minority, just as they are in a minority who conduct themselves with holy intransigence in the present hour. The greater part of men, today as then, is made up of the mediocre, who hate everything that leads to a clash of ideas. The mediocre man is the one who hates men superior to him, because their presence disturbs his tranquillity, which is not the classical tranquillitas ordinis — that is, the peace assured by the order of absolute values — but is that of his own selfish interest. The superior man is instead the one who follows a high and disinterested rule of life and thought. He is a man of firm and consistent ideas, of lived principles.

The French writer Ernest Hello dedicated memorable pages to the “mediocre man”. The mediocre man, Hello writes, is the one who lives in fear of putting himself on the line. He is afraid of polemics, of controversies. He detests genius and virtue; he loves moderation and what he calls the “happy medium”. One of his characteristics is the deference he has for public opinion. He does not speak; he repeats. He respects those who are successful, but fears those against whom the world fights. He would go so far as to court his worst enemy if he were honoured by the world, but is ready to distance himself from his best friend when the world attacks him.

The mediocre man loves to present himself as “moderate”. Moderation, when it is true, is a virtue, but it has nothing to do with “moderatism”, which is instead a practice of life that is opposed to the intransigence of one who fights to defend the truth. To the hyper-moderate, truth seems an excess — as does error, for that matter.

In an article published in the magazine Catolicismo in September 1954, Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira explained the matter well:

“[T]he defining characteristic of moderatism is that of steering in practice to a ‘third force’ position, intermediate between truth and error, between good and evil. If at one extreme is the City of God, whose children seek to spread goodness and truth in all forms, and if at the other extreme is the City of Satan, whose followers seek to spread error and evil in all forms, it is clear that the struggle between these two cities is inevitable: two forces operating on the same field and in opposite directions must necessarily fight each other. It follows from this that there can be no spreading of truth and goodness that does not imply the fight against error and evil; conversely, there can be no spreading of error and evil that does not involve the fight against truth and goodness, against those who spread the truth and work for the good.”

The moderate and mediocre man detests the man who is consistent with his own ideas, whom he defines as intolerant. In reality, intolerance is not a virtue, just as tolerance is not, but, like tolerance, it can be a consequence of the exercise of virtue. Intolerance can be tied to self-love, arrogance, bitter zeal, or it can arise from an intransigent love of the truth, just as tolerance can stem from charity and prudence, but can also be the offspring of a culpable relativism and spirit of compromise.

“Intolerance” is the derogatory term that Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire applied to holy intransigence. He who professes holy intransigence has his model in the Most Blessed Virgin Mary. In another article in Catolicismo of March 1954, this time dedicated to the Immaculate and to holy intransigence, Professor Corrêa de Oliveira, after describing the era of confusion and moral corruption of the time that preceded the birth of Christ, writes: 

“While the ancient world was living through all these circumstances, who was the Most Holy Virgin, created by God in that age of complete decadence? She was the most complete, intransigent, categorical, unequivocal and radical antithesis of her time. … ‘Immaculate’ is a privative word. Etymologically, it signifies the absence of stains, and therefore of any error whatsoever, as minimal as it may be, and of any sin whatsoever, as slight and insignificant as it may seem. It is integrity in faith and virtue. It is therefore absolute, systematic, irreducible intransigence; it is complete, profound and diametrical aversion to every kind of error or evil. Holy intransigence in truth and goodness is orthodoxy and purity, insofar as it opposes heterodoxy and evil. In order to love God without measure, Our Lady correspondingly loved with all her heart everything that is of God. And since she hated evil without measure, she hated Satan, his pomps and his works without measure; she hated the devil, the world and the flesh [‘because all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust thereof, but he who does the will of God abides forever!’ (cf. 1 Jn 2:16-17)]. Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception is the Lady of holy intransigence.”

And therefore let us boldly follow the school of “holy intransigence”.