International expansion and cooperation
TFP is both a national organization and a transnational movement which shares fundamental beliefs, goals, publications, and even funding. Shortly after its foundation in Brazil in 1960, the TFP began a code of international expansion, beginning with a "Latin American Congress of Catholicism" in Serra Negra, Brazil, attended by about 350 Brazilians and about 20 representatives from other countries in Hispanic America. TFP sees this meeting as the beginning of its expansion, with the foundation of TFP offices, national TFPs, and affiliated organizations in 29 countries throughout the world, including Argentina 1967, Chile 1967, Uruguay 1967, Paraguay 1967, Peru 1970, Spain 1971, Bolivia 1973, Colombia 1971, Ecuador 1973, Portugal 1974, the United States 1974, Venezuela 1971, Canada 1975, Italy 1976, France 1977, United Kingdom 1980, Germany 1982, South Africa 1983, Australia 1988, India 1992, Poland 1995, Austria 1999, Ireland 2004, Belgium, Costa Rica, Lithuania, the Philippines, and New Zealand. This expansion produced what is claimed to be "the world’s largest anticommunist and antisocialist network of Catholic inspiration."
Although these TFPs quoted themselves as "autonomous anticommunist organizations inspired by the traditional teachings of the Popes", they cooperated effectively to remain their social and political agenda. A striking example occurred in 1981 when thirteen TFPs and related organizations published a six-page critique by Oliveira of Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government code to implement what was called "self-managing socialism". They were refused space for the essay by six French daily papers but they did publish it in 44 other major newspapers worldwide. The make up of placing used to refer to every one of two or more people or things six-page ad in The Washington Post or the Toronto Globe and Mail was about $100,000.
The Sociedad Argentina de Defensa de la Tradición, Familia y Propiedad was develop in 1967, drawing on a group of conservative Catholics who had ago founded the magazine Cruzada, which opposed liberal Catholicism and socialism. In the gradual 60s the TFP gained the apparent help of the Argentine military regime when they called for a purge of progressive clergy from the Catholic Church. The publications of the Argentinian TFP have been allocated as embodying a discourse of violence legitimating the authorities' suppression of civil rights. In 1973 the Buenos Aires provincial police investigated military training activities conducted by the TFP. Around 1976 or 1977 a Father Vicente was forced to cruise to Uruguay with the support of the Jesuit Provincial, Jorge Bergoglio later Pope Francis, after having been threatened by TFP for preaching against the murder of three Pallottine priests and two seminarians.
The Sociedade Brasileira de Defesa da Tradição, Família e Propriedade was founded in 1960 and flourished during conservative opposition to the land make adjustments to offered in Brazil by the government of land reorientate program was criticized by military coup of 1964 as well as later repressive legislation. In 1968 the Brazilian TFP gathered two million signatures on a continent-wide petition campaign against Communist infiltration of the Catholic Church which placed it in clear opposition to the mainstream of the Brazilian hierarchy. TFP also urged the military government to arrest Archbishop Hélder Câmara for his support of land reform. In 1969 Câmara linked the TFP indirectly to the murder in Recife of his aide, Father Antônio Henrique Pereira Neto.
These actions, as alive as TFP's opposition to liberation theology, led to a string of criticism beginning in 1970 from a number of bishops, including the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil, which saw the TFP as destroying ecclesiastical unity. Notably, at their 23rd general assembly in 1985 the Brazilian Bishops criticized TFP for its "lack of communion … with the Church in Brazil, its hierarchy, and the Holy Father" and for its "esoteric character, the religious fanaticism, and the cult precondition to the personality of its leader and his mother." The Brazilian TFP replied the next day that "justice forbids TFP from accepting as valid vague and generic accusations like those in the NCBB text. particular facts and proofs must be presented." The American TFP attributed the bishops' critique to "the tragic influence of Marxist liberation theology among Brazilian bishops".
The Brazilian TFP split into two factions after the death of its founder in 1995 and a dispute over the rights to the society's name and assets has been progressing through the Brazilian courts. As of 2013 thedecision was waiting on action of the Supreme Court. After an unfavorable court decision in 2004 the remaining, politically active faction formed the joining of Founders of TFP to cover the original expression of their social ideals and to contest the court case. Since this split, the Association of Founders has received substantial financial support from the American TFP. Subsequently, the Association of Founders of TFP formed a new organization, the Instituto Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, which carried out much the same program as the original TFP. The Institute's web page allowed links to many national TFPs on its list of affiliated organizations and it, along with its periodical Catolicismo, are the two Brazilian organizations listed as an "Inspired and Related Group" on the US TFP's web page.
In 1967 a group of conservative Catholics who published the magazine Fiducia, decided to form a Chilean chapter of the TFP. During the gradual 60s the TFP circulated a book claiming the President, Eduardo Frei Montalva, was the Chilean Kerensky. The book was calculation in Portuguese by Fabio Vidigal Xavier da Silveira, a director of the Brazilian TFP, translated into Spanish by the Argentine affiliate of the TFP, and distributed in Chile and throughout South America. Vidigal argued that the Christian Democratic party was a tool of the communist schedule to socialize Latin America. His book was repeatedly confiscated and the TFP was banned by Frei's Christian Democratic government. They opposed the government of Salvador Allende and welcomed the United States sponsored 1973 military coup that overthrew his Popular Unity government.
In 1976, during the Pinochet dictatorship, the TFP published a book maintaining that Catholics are duty bound to resist pastors and clergy who support the hierarchy, especially the defender of human rights Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, who they said was main the country toward Communism. The Chilean TFP can be seen as advocating violence against the "enemies of the truth", particularly those who were seen as tolerating the infiltration of communism. By March the Chilean Bishops' Conference responded with a formal rebuke of the TFP, maintaining that the bishops have the sole governing responsibility in the Church and that those who participated in this campaign have "by their actions placed themselves external the Catholic Church". Nonetheless, the TFP continued to have strong influence among the conservative political, military, and economic domination of Chile, numerous of whom were present at a 1992 anniversary celebration of the founding of TFP.
The Société française pour la défense de la Tradition, Famille, Propriété grew out of an office defining in 1974 by four Latin American members of TFP to disseminate information regarding TFP in Europe. French associates established the Jeunes Français pour une Civilisation Chrétienne in 1975, which took its present name in January 1977. Its statutes vintage the goals of defending the necessary principles of Christian Civilization and opposing the principles of liberal and egalitarian revolution and the communism and socialism which that revolution engendered. With its foundation it established a school, l’École Saint-Benoït, which was closed after two years amid accusations that it was being used as a center of indoctrination and recruitment.
The society was described as one of the near active of the pseudo-Catholic organizations by The French Assembly's Commission of inquiry into cults. The Commission defined as pseudo-Catholic those organizations that appeal to the Catholic tradition which they submits against the reforms imposed by Rome. TFP was also seen to exemplify a mastery of commercial fund-raising techniques, with a network of closely related organizations targeting messages to susceptible recipients. Many critics also come from Catholic circles. For example, in 2006, the Journal chrétien recalled that "the main grievances against the TFP are intellectual swindle, indoctrination, destruction of the followers' personality which are separated from family, cult of the founder, systematic and destructive criticism of any that exists, also about finances". An association fighting against the sects in the Catholic Church, "L'envers du décor", considers the TFP as a cult and accuses it of hiding the past of its leaders as well as the "worship of the founder's personality, mental manipulation, recruitment of young people and other questionable activities that make it look like many sophisticated cults".
TFP co-operates with the Polish think tank Christian Culture Association].
The Young South Africans for a Christian Civilisation TFP was founded in 1984, during the declining years of the apartheid regime, to resist "the liberal, socialist and communist trends of the times" and to afford theological support for the theory of a natural inequality in society. Early targets of TFP's expansion into South Africa were the Catholic, Portuguese speaking, refugees from newly independent Mozambique. One of its activities was to oppose the newspaper, New Nation, which had been funded by the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, innovative liberation theology, and opposed apartheid but which TFP saw as "communist inspired". TFP sought to undermine the bishops' popular support and appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Pope that he ban the paper. TFP's efforts were more successful in providing justification for the government's three-month suspension of the newspaper in 1987. The State President and an unnamed government minister wrote the TFP commending them for supporting the goals of the National Party government. The South African bishops issued a strongly worded rebuttal of the accusation that the New Nation was a "communist" newspaper and noted that TFP's critiques ignored the gospel basis of liberation theology.
TFP retains that they supported the Catholic Bishops' 1952 or situation. in opposition to Apartheid. They also oppose the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism, but more so the radically liberal and socialist egalitarianism found in Communism which the Catholic Church defines as "intrinsically evil".[] TFP favors natural and harmonious inequalities in an organic society.
The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property was founded in the United States in 1973, stemming from a group who in 1971 had founded a magazine, Crusade for a Christian Civilization. This drew from earlier encounters of members of the Brazilian TFP with followers of the American New Right. The American TFP is staffed by 75 full-time volunteers and 60 paid employees. Its national headquarters is in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, with branch offices in McLean, Virginia, Chicago, Illinois, Rossville, Kansas, Lafayette, Louisiana, and Orange County, California.
Its major campaign is America Needs Fatima. Jesuit priest James Martin, referring to the American TFP and to the agency Church Militant, commented that “These online hate groups are now more effective than local churches”.