Well...THAT'S not a Comparison You See Everyday...

While working in some archives today, I happened to be reading a lecture given to the military school (Escola Superior da Guerra) in Brazil. The paper was presented by professor Tarcísio Meirelles Padilha in 1970, which was right in the heart of the most repressive phase (1968-1973) of Brazil's twenty-one year dictatorship (1964-1985). Throughout, this philosophy professor decried the "violence" of groups such as students, priests, and exiles (who had to flee Brazil in the face of torture and disappearance). The paper basically decried the "subversives" seeking to undermine the "democratic" and "revolutionary" government of the dictatorship. Caught up in a particularly religious and pro-Western moment, Padilha mentioned both Richard Nixon and Pope Paul VI, proclaiming Paul VI was just like Nixon (and not the other way around) because, and I quote directly, "He [Paul VI], like his predecessors, has as one of his major preoccupations the attainment of world peace."

So, Nixon, who hadn't even begun to pretend to withdraw American troops in "Vietnamization" and had in fact increased the war in Vietnam, was just like Paul VI, the pope who presided over most of the Second Vatican Council, which, among other things, opened up the church to non-Latin ceremonies, admitted that Catholicism was not the one true form of Christianity, and basically approved the social message that would come to be known as Liberation Theology in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.........................