Luigi Corvaglia
A strange religious expert
The 'Foro Espiritual' in Estella, Spain, is, as it says on the city's website, 'a workshop of fraternity where different religious communities coexist in an atmosphere of harmony, peace and joy, seeking meeting points with the aim of the world finding peace'. In short, an ecumenical festival with clear New Age connotations. At the first edition in 2006, the speakers included a certain Ives Guillou, who was presented as an 'expert on religions'. Anyone who knows enough about the 'strategy of tension" and the italian 'anni di piombo' (years of lead) will wince when they read this name. It is the real name of the man who went down in history as Yves Guérin-Sérac. He was the founder of the Aginter Presse agency, a covert terrorist structure that was financed by Salazar's secret police and had links to Western intelligence services. Aginter Presse functioned as a control room for right-wing subversion from 1966 to 1974. Through the neo-fascist organisation Ordine Nuovo, Aginter Presse was involved in terrorist attacks in Italy, starting with the massacre in Piazza Fontana, and in Operation Condor, a CIA plan to eliminate opponents of South American dictatorships in the 1970s.
It is somewhat unusual for the grey eminence of international black terrorism to speak about universal love and the 'human family' at a religious festival, especially given the fact that he had been in hiding for decades when he was listed at the festival under his real name. Interestingly, however, this was not the first time Guérin-Serac had participated in events related to the world of alternative spirituality. The journalist Andrea Sceresini inform us that in 2002 Guérin-Sérac took part in a meeting of the Women's Federation for World Peace, an emanation of the Unification Church. What makes it all even more incomprehensible is that Guérin-Serac was anything but ecumenical, not only politically but also religiously. One man who knew him very well was the lifelong Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who was a member of the neo-fascist groups ‘Ordine Nuovo’ and ‘Avanguardia Nazionale’. He claimed that what struck him most about the figure who called himself Ralf at the time was his religiosity: 'Ralf was very Catholic. Fundamentalist Catholic!' In other words, he was not the type to attend new age festivals. Vinciguerra, however, added a further notation:
Christian civilisation was built on millions of dead and he had no qualms about doing the same to preserve it!
The traditionalist matrix
(a) the doctrine of double effect
The twisted logical and moral entanglements that characterise a particular environment in which the political right combines with religious radicalism are difficult to see through. For example, there are two glaring contradictions in the lines above. The first relates to the coexistence of the fundamentalist Catholic and the mass murderer in one and the same person - specifically in Guérin-Serac. The second contradiction is that of one who professes a form of Catholicism that is hostile to ecumenism, because he is fundamentalist, and actively participates in events organised by other cults. To solve these apparent puzzles, we need to unravel the skein and start where the thread of the story begins. Following it will take us to unimaginable places.
The proximity of Catholic traditionalism to murders and terrorist attacks was already evident during the Algerian war. The OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) was a French clandestine paramilitary organisation with the slogan 'French Algeria or death'. It was founded in Madrid in 1961 under the protection of Francisco Franco's fascist government and had as its main political reference the Catholic counter-revolutionary organisation La Cité Catolique, which supplied the OAS with numerous fighters. In fifteen months, the OAS caused around 1,500 deaths through terrorist attacks of unprecedented cruelty. After the Evian Agreement between the French government and the Algerian Liberation Front, which laid the foundations for Algerian independence from France, became known, the OAS decided to carry out an assassination attempt on de Gaulle, who was considered a traitor. This failed and the organisation disbanded.
As anomalous as it may seem, it should be noted that in Catholic circles linked to the military hierarchies, the practise of torture and murder was considered worthy of absolution. This was based on the ideas of Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine of Hippo. Louis Delarue, chaplain of a unit deployed in Algeria, said that one had to choose between two evils, and letting a bandit temporarily suffer the death penalty was the lesser.
Probably the best justification for the nefarious deeds of Catholic activists was provided by St Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of the double effect: 'The evil caused by an action directed towards the good does not invalidate the morality of the action itself'.
Among the OAS volunteers was Yves Guérin-Sérac, who apparently based his mission on the logic of St Thomas, as he was later prepared to kill millions of people in order to achieve the goal of protecting traditional Christian society.
b) Subversion and revolution
After the defeat in Algeria, Guérin-Sérac and other OAS veterans fled first to Franco’s Spain and then to Salazar's Portugal in order to avoid being sentenced for desertion and treason. It was here that the idea of founding an international anti-communist organisation took shape. This structure was to consist of specialists in the fight against 'subversion'. This concept is of central importance. An important reference for the OAS fighters is said to have been La Cité Catolique. It is therefore appropriate to say a few words about this organisation. It was a Catholic counter-revolutionary organisation led by Jean Ousset. He saw the root of all evil in 'subversion'. By this he meant the distortion of the Christian order, natural law and the Creator's plan, a distortion that had been given its greatest impetus by the French Revolution. It was no coincidence that the organisation's journal, 'Verbe', described itself as a civic training organ for the counter-revolution. Ultimately, what the military called 'counterinsurgency' had its roots in Catholic radicalism.
So although Ousset had fully followed Marshal Pétain's Vichy regime during the German occupation of France and later said that he had nothing to apologise for in this regard, the Cité Catolique cannot be described as a fascist organisation, but rather as reactionary.
Similarly, the structure developed by Guérin-Sérac, who was primarily a Catholic traditionalist, was geared towards the defence of 'Western values' threatened by communism and related subversive forces, rather than fascist ideology.
From the 1960s onwards, this fight against subversion also took the form of the defence of the 'white presence' in the few African territories that remained in European hands.
Ousset was not alone in this battle. The same struggle against modernity and the disruption of the natural order was waged in Brazil by Plinio Correa de Oliveira and his association Tradition, Family and Property. What Ousset called 'subversion', Correa de Oliveira called 'revolution'.
De Oliveira argued that Christianity had suffered a dramatic spiritual decline since the 15th century due to the spread of social egalitarianism and moral liberalism, which had put an end to the righteousness that had characterised mediaeval society.
He therefore considered it necessary to fully restore Christian civilisation through the reintroduction of social hierarchies and aristocratic titles, as well as the dissolution of socialist parties. De Oliveira was the advocate of a programme for the 'restoration of order', which was described as a return to a
Christian civilisation, austere and hierarchical, fundamentally sacred, anti-egalitarian and anti-liberal.
TFP has remained true to this goal by actively participating in the efforts of reactionary forces to depose democratically elected presidents in Latin America, beginning with the coups in Brazil in 1964 and that of Pinochet in Chile in 1973. Margareth Power writes that the TFP maintained a "mutually supportive relationship" with Pinochet's dictatorship for seventeen years, justifying the violation of human rights with the overriding need to fight communism. This is the same logic used by the Catholic OAS military in Algeria.
Penny Lernoux points out that the actions of the TFP were in line with the goals of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which not only supported the coup but even seems to have financed the TFP for its work against democracy in Chile (page 297). There are even reports of martial arts training camps in Rio de Janeiro for members of the TFP, the army and the police.
In those years, the TFP forged links with the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), which, according to Benjamin A. Cowan, was "a secretive and often questionable organisation whose activities in the second half of the 20th century ranged from spreading panic to overt or covert support for right-wing terrorism“ (page 156). The fifth WACL congress, held in Manila in 1971, was hosted by dictator Ferdinand Marcos and was attended by the Brazilian and Argentinian delegations of the TFP (Power, op.cit., p. 98).
In the 1980s, the TFP extended its reach further by joining forces with and co-founding the International Policy Forum of the US New Right theorist Paul Weyrich.
Plinio Correa de Oliveira and Jean Ousset did not like each other because the Brazilian found the Frenchman too socialist and because of his allusions to the French counter-revolutionary culture of the 19th century, which always harboured a certain hostility towards the ruling bourgeoisie, as he considered it to be secular and Masonic. However, the two lessons are composed in an Italian counter-revolutionary association that has both Ousset and de Oliveira as cultural references: Alleanza Cattolica.
c) Aginter Presse
In May 1974, after the 'Carnation Revolution' had brought democracy back to Portugal, a group of soldiers stormed the premises of a press agency at Rua des Pracas 13 in Lisbon on the orders of an official from the PIDE, Salazar's secret police. The agency was Aginter Presse, founded by Guérin-Sérac. Analysis of the documents found revealed that the fake press agency was an international centre of subversion, the control and coordination room of an unconventional war, capable of carrying out espionage operations, organising attacks, training mercenaries and infiltrating revolutionary movements. The agency consisted of
- an espionage centre linked to the Portuguese secret services and other Western intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the West German Gehlen network;
- a recruitment and training centre for mercenaries and terrorists specialising in attacks and sabotage, especially in Third World countries;
- a political organisation called 'Orde et Tradition', flanked by a military arm called 'Organisation d'Action Contre le Communisme International' (OACI).
In the Rua des Pracas archives, evidence was found of active cooperation between Aginter Presse and the security services of major Western countries, which commissioned the agency to carry out 'dirty' operations that were not officially allowed to be carried out by government agencies of democratic countries. The American services supported the agency, for example, in the anti-communist plan Stay Behind, in which the Italian paramilitary secret organisation Gladio was also involved. Relations with the American intelligence were conducted via intermediary organisations that avoided directly financing the Aginter Presse.
One of these organisations was the John Birch Society. This organisation of the economic and religious right is the prototype of a galaxy of conservative foundations and think tanks that form the backbone of American soft power. We will see later what role they play in supporting 'religious freedom" in the world.
This paradoxical struggle against subversion through subversion experienced its greatest stage in Italy with the so-called strategy of tension, which began with the Piazza Fontana bombing in 1969. The documents of Judge Salvini, who was in charge of investigating the massacre, clearly show that the agency and Guérin-Sérac himself were involved in the attack. In June 2005, the Court of Cassation ruled that the massacre was the work of a "subversive group founded in Padua within the Ordine Nuovo', a neo-fascist group founded by Pino Rauti, whose links with Guérin-Sérac have been proven, as Judge Salvini also stated in the parliamentary commission of enquiry into the massacres. The relations between Ordine Nuovo and parts of the Italian secret service were so close that one cannot speak of a simple infiltration of the organisation into the security services , but of two parallel and coordinated structures. Ordine Nuovo was also referred to as the 'prosthesis of the deviated services'.
The Ordine Nuovo also consisted of young people who were fascinated by mystical and esoteric cultures. Rauti himself had them practise magical rituals. The culture of the Ordine Nuovo was permeated by an anti-modern, hierarchical and spiritualist attitude (see Stefania Limiti, Potere Occulto, ChiareLettere, 2022, p. 278).
Through the OAS and Aginter Presse, European neo-fascism underwent a strategic and fundamental change: from an anti-American and anti-Soviet stance to a defence of the West, even becoming a force defending Atlanticism.
d) Alleanza Cattolica
During the trial for the massacre in Piazza Fontana, Giancarlo Rognoni, the leader of the terrorist group Ordine Nuovo in Milan in the 1960s, who was accused of helping Delfo Zorzì to smuggle the suitcase containing the explosives into the bank where the massacre took place, was defended by Benedetto Tusaan, a representative of the traditionalist association Alleanza Cattolica. Another representative of Alleanza Cattolica, Mauro Ronco, defended Carlo Maria Maggi, one of the most important representatives of the Ordine Nuovo in northern Italy, who is considered a 'theorist of massacres'. As the insider Roberto De Mattei, who was one of the first activists, writes, 'Alleanza Cattolica was the backbone of Catholic reaction in Italy in the decade 1970-1980'.
The organisation was founded in 1968 by Giovanni Cantoni together with Agostino Sanfratello.
Italian traditionalism, which saw its fulcrum in AC, was also always very critical of the “Risorgimento”, the political and social movement that led to the unity of Italy in 19th century, which was seen as the Italian version of the French Revolution. Alleanza Cattolica was therefore dedicated to spreading revisionist interpretations of the history of the Risorgimento and the apologetics of the various 'insurrections', i.e. the Catholic popular uprisings against the liberal and democratic revolutions (Vendée in France, Sanfedistas in Italy, Cristeros in Mexico, etc.).
Sanfratello is close to the neo-fascist terrorist Franco Freda and was the mentor of Roberto Fiore, the founder of the extreme right-wing movement Terza Posizione. Freda was convicted for the 1969 bombings in Italy, then for incitement to racial hatred and subversive association. Fiore, on the other hand, was sentenced by the Italian judiciary in 1985 for the offences of subversive association and armed gang. During his years as a fugitive, Fiore was protected by MI6 as an 'agent of British intelligence'. In 1991, the European Commission of Inquiry into Racism and Xenophobia confirmed his association with MI6 since the early 1980s. Fiore and Sanfratello are also the founders of the political movement "Forza Nuova", on whose lists Sanfratello himself stood as a candidate in 2003.
President of Forza Nuova was another representative of Italian catholicism, the jurist Piero Vassallo, author of an essay in defence of the Nazis in court in Nuremberg.
There are many lawyers in the AC. Among them is Alfredo Mantovano, who at the time of writing is Undersecretary of State in the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and responsible for the secret services.
However, the most influential lawyer in AC is Massimo Introvigne. He joined Alleanza Cattolica in 1972, Introvigne soon became the most active member of the association and one of the main signatories of the magazine "Cristianità", the official organ of AC. in 2008, he even succeeded founder Cantoni, who had suffered a stroke, in the official role of 'Reggente Vicario', but effectively at the head of the organisation (Cantoni only retained the position of Regent in an honorary capacity). Introvigne continued the tradition of insurrectionary apologetics by founding the Centre for Counter-Revolutionary Studies (CESCOR) in Turin.
But what is Alleanza cattolica?
The organisation says it is committed to defending the 'social doctrine of the Church', where 'social doctrine' has nothing to do with a commitment to solving social problems, but rather with the instructions that believers should follow in the public sphere according to the principles of 'natural morality'. De Mattei writes:
Giovanni Cantoni's encounter with Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, whose major work Revolution and Counter-Revolution became the basic text for the training of young fighters, was decisive for him.
However, Introvigne writes in an article in 'Cristianità' on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Jean Ousset's magnum opus "Pour qu'Il règne" that the founder of Alleanza Cattolica chose Correa de Oliveira's text as a "reference manual" because it was a simpler compendium of counter-revolutionary doctrine than Ousset's texts, whose lavish complexity did not make them easily accessible. Nevertheless, Ousset remains an important reference for the members. As Introvigne himself told me in a private communication, "Alleanza Cattolica has always 'navigated' between Correa de Oliveira and Ousset, recognising that there was also a pluralism within the counter-revolutionary world, participating in Ousset's famous Lausanne congresses and maintaining no less friendly relations with this world than with the TFP."
Ultimately, the Alleanza Cattolica moves between the organisation that was dear to the OAS fighters (and whose veterans flowed into the Aginter Presse) and the Brazilian association that collaborated with the South American caudillos protected by the CIA.
Alleaanza Cattolica has produced two new entities, one by secession and one by budding. The Lepanto Foundation was born through secession. This split was allegedly the result of a disagreement that arose during the referendum campaign on the repeal of the law on voluntary abortion in 1981 between those who held a 'maximalist' position, who wanted to prevent abortion even for therapeutic reasons, and those who, on the other hand, for reasons of expediency, had bowed to a position that agreed with a minimalist goal, i.e. maintaining the possibility of abortion in the event of the mother's death. The maximalists, including Sanfratello and De Mattei, therefore decided to leave the association and found the Lepanto Centre.
The two realities, which later diverged more and more on various issues, especially with regard to Bergoglio's magisterium, instead pursued in a singular synchrony in following the development of 'Tradition, Family and Property' towards a US-style neoconservatism. It is necessary to dwell on this development for a moment.
(e) neocon slip
From the mid-1980s, Tradition, Family and Property came under considerable fire from the institutions. A scandal had already shaken the image of the TFP in France at the end of the 1970s. The Saint Benoit school, founded by the TFP in Chateauroux in 1977, hit the headlines when former members of the association and concerned family members denounced the indoctrination of children that took place there through manipulative pressure and led to negative effects on their relationships with their families. This indoctrination allegedly led the children to fully identify with the organisation and its goals, which had a negative impact on their family relationships. In particular, many students were made to see their parents, especially fathers with prestigious professional positions, as an expression of the 'revolutionary' values that the organisation was supposed to combat.
A report on the school's aberrations entitled 'Tradition, Family, Property. Catholic association or millenarian sect?" was compiled by anonymous writers.
Among the other accusations made in the dossier was the excessive veneration of the founder's mother, Mrs Lucilia, whose locks of hair were elevated to the status of relics. Following this report, the school was closed. At a court hearing in 1982, it was established that the students had been subjected to psychological measures to make them members of the organisation.
In 1984, following a parliamentary investigation, Venezuela banned the TFP, accusing it of practising forms of psychological conditioning of its followers. The following year, the Brazilian Bishops' Conference declared that the TFP was incompatible with the Church 'because of its esoteric character, its religious fanaticism, the cult reserved for the personality of its founder and his mother and the improper use of the name of the Virgin Mary' (XXIII National Assembly of the Brazilian Bishops' Conference, Itaici, 18 April 1985). Two things then happened. Firstly, the TFP published a haphazard pamphlet destined, however, to inaugurate a fortunate thread and entitled Brainwashing. A Myth Exploited by the New 'Therapeutic Inquisition. Its central theme was that mental manipulation was a myth used to combat religion by a fictitious and conspiratorial 'anti-cult movement' made up of psychiatrists and communists. in 1991, TFP reiterated this by publishing in French "The New Atheist and Psychiatric Inquisition Calls Those They Wants to Destroy 'Cults'", by Gustavo Antonio and Luís Sérgio Solimeo, ed. Société Française pour la Defence de la Tradition, Famille et Propriété, Paris 1991, translation of a Spanish text from 1985), which already makes the concept clear in the title.
The second event was that Correa de Oliveira and his followers suddenly developed a vision in which they saw Christian America as the only counter-revolutionary force capable of responding to European secularism, the fruit of the French Revolution, and the 'Marxisation" of the Latin Church, which had gone so far as to criticise Tradition (and even TFP).
Tradition, Family and Property has collaborated with representatives and associations of American conservatism such as Paul Weyrich and the Council for National Policy (CNP). This is a secret organisation described by the New York Times as 'a little-known club of a few hundred of the country's most influential conservatives' that meets three times a year behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference.
Their European sister organisations of TFP, such as Alleanza Cattolica and the Lepanto Foundation, have taken the same stance, allying themselves with American neoconservatism in the fight against secularism and defending 'religious freedom". De Mattei (Lepanto Foundation) is a member of the board of experts of the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute as well as the Acton Institute - some of the most active think tanks in the American neoconservative galaxy. Introvgne himself writes in his book on Plinio Correa de Oliveira (Una battaglia nella notte, 2008) that TFP has succeeded in linking with the American right "a set of interests involving the major foundations around which conservative culture revolves" (p. 210).
All of these associations are part of a vast network of Christian pro-free market organisations called the Atlas Network, which is known to operate [...] as a silent extension of US foreign policy, [...] think tanks associated with Atlas receive silent funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, an essential arm of American soft power. American soft power.
Lee Fang writes this in Sphere of influence: How American libertarians are remaking Latin American politics, The Intercept, 9 August 2017
In view of this change in political perspective, the foundation of a new institution from the AC in 1988 seems to follow the same logical sequence. This was the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni (Centre for the Study of New Religions), CESNUR. Its founder and director is Massimo Introvigne.
f) CESNUR, the counter- revolution with the mask
CESNUR is a well-known research centre for 'new religious movements' that claims to be 'independent of any religious or denominational organisation'. Although Introvigne has often responded to criticism of the dubious neutrality of a centre for the study of religions whose main representatives are members of Alleanza Cattolica (e.g. Pierluigi Zoccatelli, Marco Respinti and Andrea Menegotto) by pointing out that CESNUR has nothing to do with Alleanza cattolica and works in an avalutative and scientific manner, it was Introvigne himself who declared in 1993:
Thus, the activists of Alleanza Cattolica, together with others, have founded and run CESNUR, the Centre for the Study of New Religions, [... ...] within the context of an apologetic response that does not fail to return to the broader framework of the dramatic struggle between evangelisation and anti-evangelisation, and thus, in the language of the Catholic counter-revolutionary school from which Alleanza Cattolica draws its inspiration, between revolution and counter-revolution, a framework whose thematic presentation constitutes one of the main objectives of the association.
In ‘La questione della nuova religiosità’ by Massimo Introvigne, published by Cristianità, 1993 (ISBN 88-85236-14-6).
"The Catholic counter-revolutionary school from which Alleanza Cattolica draws its inspiration' and which forms the backbone of CESNUR's activities is that of Ousset and Correa de Oliveira.
Over the years, CESNUR has emerged as the main actor in favour of 'religious freedom", presenting itself as a scientific authority entitled to defend the cults criticised by the so-called 'anti-cult movement', which is hostile to free belief. This includes spreading the idea in publications and at congresses that spiritual manipulation does not exist. We are once again faced with the paradox from which we started, namely that Catholic traditionalism thunderstruck by ecumenism on the road to Damascus. Perhaps it was not Damascus.
The dark side of politics
Jeffrey M. Bale of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, arguably the foremost international expert on political and religious extremism, terrorism, unconventional warfare and covert political operations, does not hesitate to write in the second volume of The Darkest Side of Politics that unconventional warfare play a role organisations, promote "political and religious agendas that, in the name of religious and democratic freedoms, actually aim to defend extremist, totalitarian and anti-democratic groups from investigation, criticism and possible state repression, and more generally to resist or even drive back secular humanism, liberalism and modernism in the West". The expert adds that 'perhaps the most important case of these organisations is CESNUR'.. The 'sub rosa' agenda of defending religious freedom with paradoxical 'liberal' arguments (since its director is a 'right-wing Catholic activist'), the "sub rosa" agenda of this centre is to fight against secularism.
Seen this way, CESNUR appears as the “cognitive” version of the Aginter Presse. That was the control and coordination room of a physical and psychological war against communism; CESNUR is the control room of a cultural and cognitive influence war against secularism.
Indeed, Massimo Introvigne still describes French secularism today as a consequence of the Jacobin terror (revolution, subversion), whose heirs would be the government agency Mission interministérielle de vigilance et de lutte contre les dérives sectaires (MIVILUDES) and the Fédération Européenne des Centres de Recherche et d'Information sur le Sectarisme (FECRIS), a French organisation that brings together European associations for the defence of and information on the sectarian phenomenon. He writes in an article dated 9 May 2023:
France, even more than Germany, has always been the European country that has made intolerance of religion almost a national sport. Article 2 of the French constitution consists of the famous motto liberté, egalité, fraternité. [...] Not everyone knows that the full text originally contained the closing words 'ou la mort'. [...] After 240 years, the anti-religious mentality of a certain France has still not completely disappeared. [...]
In short, the enemy is still Robespierre.
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