Editor’s note: This interview was first published, in German, on May 14, 2024, at kath.net. It was translated into English by Frank Nitsche-Robinson.
Vatican (kath.net) “When I look at the Gospel sociologically, then yes, I am a communist, and Jesus is one, too.”
With this dictum, Pope Francis explains the intention of the Gospel. In doing so, he approximates communism with Christianity, even puts it on the same level, since it allegedly exhibits an intention compatible with that of Christianity. This assessment gives rise to the suspicion that he does not regard the teachings of communism as reprehensible, but that, on the contrary, they can also be used to lead a life under Christian auspices.
Communism, whose plan-economy order proved to be disastrous and without a future in 1989/90, is nevertheless presented to the astonished faithful as the ideal for leading a successful life. Although Marx’s philosophy, upon which communism is based, has proved to be unsuitable, its appeal is apparently still unbroken. The general consensus seems to be that the idea is very good, only the people who have put it into action are unsuitable. With the right personnel, as Marx also assumed, it would seem possible to establish in the world what is described by the religious concept of paradise. Contemporaries must realize that the communist utopia seems to be ineradicable.
Even in the Roman Church, Marx’s ideas continue to be used to present a better life to the world and to emphasize the Christian demand for charity. This is why Francis apparently sees communism as the promise of salvation in order to free the world from poverty so that all people can lead a dignified life. However, the experiences of recent history, which can be seen in the collapse of the communist systems in the Soviet Union, but also in the GDR, give rise to considerable doubts as to whether Marx’s ideas could actually help to build a better world.
It therefore makes perfect sense to discuss the relationship between Christianity and communism with theologian and philosopher Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller in order to find out whether the ideas of communism can be used to provide a foundation for the demands and ideas of Christianity and to bring them to life.
Lothar C. Rilinger: Let us start with a theological question. Does God, the Triune God of Christianity, have a place in communism?
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller: “God is love” (1 John 4:8-12). This truth is the sum of all our knowledge of God. He loved us so much that he gave his only Son on the cross so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life (cf. Jn 3:16).
Communism, as we encounter it in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and in the writings of Karl Marx and his political-ideological disciples Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, as well as their accomplices and satellites, is atheism at its core. This manifests itself in the triad “godless-merciless-loveless”, as none other than Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of its most prominent victims, stated in his work “Archipelago Gulag”. Marx not only denies the existence of God as the origin of all creation and the goal of every person’s pursuit of truth and happiness. He declares religion in general to be a dangerous illusion and a self-destructive opiate of the people and for the people. It is only an irony of history that the very de-Christianization of Western civilization is destroying people mentally and physically through the mass use of real drugs, and that the legal liberalization of drug use is celebrated as progress—on the road to self-destruction. As early as 1905, in his text “Socialism and Religion”, Vladimir I. Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union and leading figure of the atheistic New World Order, brought Marxist atheism to its ruthless epitome: “The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.”
The consequence of the denial of God as the creator of a good world that reflects his goodness and love, and as the redeemer of mankind from sin and death, manifests itself in the nihilistic image of man, which shows its satanic grimace on every page and in every action of dialectical and historical materialism. In his novel “The Demons”, Fyodor Dostoyevsky had already prophesied the consequences of atheistic socialism. For Marx, man is not a person created in the image and likeness of God, endowed with inalienable dignity, but an ensemble of ideological and social conditions. Man is completely at the mercy of the collective—state, nation, class, race—and is nothing more than material for the establishment of a utopian social order. For without God, there are no inalienable human rights from the natural and revealed will of their divine Creator, but only from the pure will to power of despots and autocrats.
That is why the consciousness of man can be changed and manipulated in such a way through popular enlightenment and propaganda, as was later done by the National Socialists (Hitler, Mein Kampf; Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the 20th Century, Goebbels), that he considers the fixed ideas inculcated into him to be his very being and essence. Woke ideology is just a neo-Marxist variant with similarly devastating consequences as those of real existing socialism, when people are persuaded that—despite all biological facts—they can determine their own gender or change it through medical surgery.
Some church representatives, who in their sanctimonious naivety are unable to analyze the atheistic foundations of neo-Marxist gender ideology, believe that they have to modernize the Church by compromising with an atheistic anthropology in sexual morality. But in doing so, they only betray their doubt that God himself is the author and guarantor of the dignity of the human person, in the person’s spiritual and physical nature, as well as in the person’s free self-determination in the context of the respective historical and social conditions of life. All forms of materialistic atheism, from the French Jacobins and the German National Socialists to the Russian Bolsheviks and Chinese Communists, hate God and life as well as Christ and his disciples to the core. The communists, in astonishing harmony with the fascists and international political terrorism, have the worst persecutions of Christians in history on their conscience. Their battle cry is the brutal fight against marriage and family, against the lives of the unborn, as well as the sick and the elderly, through abortion and assisted suicide. They hate the divinely ordained positive difference between man and woman. As (monistic) materialists, they deny the qualitative difference between humans and animals. Their leaders have themselves worshipped like pagan idols in oversized statues and posters.
Rilinger: Since communism is considered godless, we want to discuss the extent to which Christians nevertheless glorify communism in order to build a fairer world. The basis of communism is the establishment of property as “the people’s own” or common property, whereas the members of the people, i.e. the citizens, were never entered in the land register as common property owners. In his encyclical “Rerum Novarum”, Pope Leo XIII formulated the Catholic social doctrine, which must be understood as the swan song of Marxist and then communist utopias. In contrast to communism, Leo XIII called for private property for every member not only of the Church, but also of society, as personal prosperity and thus a change in one’s own social situation can only be achieved through the promise of being able, indeed allowed, to become an owner. Are the ideas of Leo XIII outdated?
Cardinal Müller: Apart from the propaganda of the politburos and the criminally stupid beliefs of those taken in by Marxist ideologues, Marxism-Leninism has nothing whatsoever to do with social justice, neither in theory nor in practice. For the religiously uprooted intellectuals of the West, on the other hand, communism was a welcome substitute religion with which they flirted (Jean-Paul Sartre). Even philosophers who had consciously broken away from Christianity fell for National Socialism, which reflects badly on their understanding of the meaning of existence (Martin Heidegger).
The only viable answer to the industrial revolution of the 19th century and the challenges of today’s technical media globalism is Catholic social teaching. Where it has been put into political practice, it has proven itself brilliantly (e.g. in the Federal Republic of Germany after the terrible experiences with the atheistic totalitarianism of the National Socialists). There will be no perfect justice on earth as long as the world is still under the power of sin. The fullness of salvation will only come after the Last Judgement, when the Kingdom of God has been realized in its perfect form. At the origin of history, God created paradise (as the epitome of communion with God in a world that was to serve man); man, however, lost it through sin—not in a mythical sense, but through his free-will decision. And through his incarnation, his death on the cross and his resurrection, the Son of God has restored us to the paradise of the New Heaven and the New Earth, which will only be revealed at the end of our earthly pilgrimage between the temptations of the world and the consolations of God (cf. Vatican II, Lumen gentium 8). Man, who wants to make himself his own God, Creator and Redeemer, only makes himself a tool of the devil (Hitler, Stalin etc.) and instead of paradise on earth comes hell on earth (Auschwitz, Gulag, Killing Fields, Chinese Cultural Revolution; biblical: the Horsemen of the Apocalypse).
Rilinger: Marx distinguishes between the wage earner and the owner of the means of production. In order to even out this difference, communism calls for class struggle. In the class struggle, one must take sides with one part of society. Can taking sides with just one party, and thus opposing the other party, be reconciled with the Christian idea that all people can enter the kingdom of God?
Cardinal Müller: Clearly, just like the current gap between the masses of the poor world population and the elites of power, information and finance, Manchester capitalism was not only the accidental result of the technical-industrial revolution, but also of the liberal bourgeoisie’s atheistic view of humanity with its (social Darwinist) curse or ideal of the struggle of all against all (as early as Thomas Hobbes) and the right of the strongest (colonialism, imperialism, racism, nationalism). Since we are already employing the metaphor of “struggle”, then we are in biblical terms referring to the struggle of man who, with the help of God’s grace, courageously stands up against the destructive power of evil in his soul and in the external world. The communist socialists with their struggle of one social class against another and the national socialists (Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”) with their war of the “master race against the racially inferior sub-humans” mean the physical and social as well as mental subjugation and destruction of all fellow human beings whom they classify as their enemies.
We Christians, on the other hand, love everyone and every single person as our brothers and sisters, including sinners and even our enemies, because they have God as their Father, who keeps the door to repentance open for everyone. “For we are not contending against flesh and blood” (Eph 6:12), but against the evil spirits that cloud people’s minds and poison their hearts. Our “armor” (Eph 6:13) consists of justice, the gospel of peace, faith, hope and love.
Rilinger: The class struggle could also be waged by force. Is it permissible to enforce God’s teaching by force?
Cardinal Müller: As early as the 2nd century, Irenaeus of Lyons wrote against the Gnostics of all times: “God made man a free [agent] from the beginning, possessing his own power, even as he does his own soul, to obey the behests of God voluntarily, and not by compulsion of God. For there is no coercion with God.” (Against heresies IV 37, 1). In his Regensburg speech in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI famously pointed out once again that God is reason and that all destructive violence contradicts God. So-called Islamists may invoke God—albeit blasphemously—but their works show that they are instruments of the devil, “the liar and murderer from the beginning” (cf. John 8:44). God’s Son suffered unjust violence in his own body without calling twelve legions of angels from heaven, and he told Peter to sheathe his sword. Only through love can we stop the spiral of violence.
Rilinger: It is often said that early Christianity can be compared to communism. Both systems propagate the shared use of property. Did early Christianity call for the dissolution of personal property or did it rather mean the social obligation of property—as it is formulated in modern and legal terms—when it was demanded that all persons should benefit from property?
Cardinal Müller: Original Christianity is the result of faith in the crucified Christ, the Son of the Father, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the atheistic political systems of Communism (“everything is the property of the people”) and National Socialism (“you are nothing, the people are everything”), neither in essence nor in practical realization. Christian charity is based on the truth that we are all children of God and that all our talents and what we have made of ourselves by using them we have received as gifts from God.
Therefore, a Christian with legitimately acquired spiritual and material assets cannot refuse to show mercy to a brother when he sees him in spiritual and material need. This is where corporal and spiritual works of mercy result from. In Christianity, the individual human being is the subject of his good deeds; in atheistic socialism, where the human being does even not exist as a person, it is the anonymous collective subject in the form of the total controlling power of the party, which distributes the goods as it sees fit. In their spiritual life, true Christians often think of the words of St. Paul, which St. Augustine often quoted against the self-righteousness of the Pelagians: “What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Cor 4:7).
Rilinger: Liberation theology aims to free the poor population of South America from its poverty. Pope Francis is very much devoted to this theology. He would like to see the return of original Christianity, which in his opinion was also realized in communism. Can you imagine that this theology-based liberation of people using the means of communist doctrine will be carried out exclusively in the class struggle against the owners of the means of production or against the owners?
Cardinal Müller: The original liberation theology wanted to be theology, i.e. talk of God, and not a pseudo-pious Marxist political sociology in disguise. That is its basic question: how can one speak of God’s love in the face of the material and spiritual misery of large sections of the population without wanting to translate the principles of Christian anthropology and social doctrine into the political practice and constitution of a democratic constitutional state? Those who, in the face of the mass crimes that have necessarily emanated from the nature of atheistic socialism, have still not awakened from their romantic slumber are reminiscent of Jesus’ sleeping disciples on the Mount of Olives, who cowardly abandoned him in the hour of passion.
Rilinger: Millions and millions of people have been killed in the name of communism. In Mao’s China alone, it is estimated that over 75 million people were killed by action or omission in the course of the Great Leap Forward, and a further two million during the Cultural Revolution, with an additional 100 million deprived of their health, property and life chances. Millions of people were also killed in Stalin’s Soviet Union, to name just two examples. In the light of these facts alone, it seems inappropriate to link communism and Christianity. Can you relate to this argument?
Cardinal Müller: Anyone who relates atheistic and misanthropic communism to the Christian faith in the philanthropic God “who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth through Jesus Christ” (cf. 1 Tim 2:4f) has understood nothing about either.
Rilinger: The idea of communism, that there should be no private property, seems to be reflected—albeit without its protagonists’ contempt for humanity—in the rules of some ecclesiastical mendicant orders. Can monastic life therefore be used as a model for the secular life of all people?
Cardinal Müller: The monastic ideal of evangelical poverty, together with the charism of obedience and celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, arises from the freedom to renounce legitimate goods, which are recognized precisely as gifts from God. Everyone has a vocation to a life in the world in matrimony and family, which presupposes a private fortune acquired through one’s own work as a basis, or to a life according to the three evangelical counsels mentioned above, to which, however, one can only open oneself for God’s call in individual freedom.
Communist propaganda, which invokes the Christian religious life for its fixed idea of the sole property of the people, can only catch on with those who have not even begun to understand Christianity and are prepared—as far as social justice is concerned—to sell their Christian right of the firstborn for the pottage of a godless and inhuman ideology.
Rilinger: Pope Francis has repeatedly addressed the human right to property by quoting John Chrysostom as saying that what we own does not belong to us, but has been stolen from the poor. Furthermore, he referred to a dictum by Gregory the Great that if we gave something to the poor, we would only give them what belongs to them. Do you share the view that people can only become owners because they have appropriated it unlawfully, i.e. stolen it, so that they are obliged to return it to the poor—the alleged previous owners?
Cardinal Müller: One has to distinguish here between what a pope says in the name of the Church in terms of doctrine, and what concerns his private knowledge of the Church Fathers. The right to property arises from the natural moral law, but entails the social obligation of property and the duty of solidarity with the community in which we live. As a father and mother in the family, as a citizen in a country, as a baptized person for the social concerns of the Church, they each have their own co-responsibility for the greater whole of the community, without, of course, confusing the community of persons with an anonymous collective.
There is a big difference between saying “You stole it from the beggars asking for a euro at your front door” to the face of a family that has created its own private home, and possibly calling the super-billionaires, who have doubled their fortunes in the course of the coronavirus crisis, robbers, in the words of St. John Chrysostom. It is certainly not in the spirit of the Church Fathers to fob off beggars with a few dollars, handed to them by the multi-billionaires of Agenda 2030 and their inclusive capitalism. Instead of parroting their slogan “own nothing, be happy”, we should first and foremost shout it in their faces so that they can apply it to themselves.
Rilinger: Even if Francis grants everyone the human right to property, he nevertheless restricts the universality of this right by postulating a hierarchy of human rights. The human right of the former owner—commonly known as the “rich”—must take second place to the human right of the new owner—commonly known as the “poor”. Can you accept that the human right to property should exhibit a different quality depending on who asserts it?
Cardinal Müller: Yes, that needs to be said to the super-rich of the New World Order, who have themselves invited to the Vatican in order to advertise their own interests with photos alongside Pope Francis. And the poor in the sense of the Gospel are not just those who receive alms outside the walls of the Vatican, but the many ordinary people with their families who have earned a modest income and a home of their own in keeping with their dignity through diligent work, and who are conscious of their dignity because they do not want to be dependent on state aid and bureaucratic arbitrariness.
Rilinger: How are the Church’s many financial tasks to be managed if its members are no longer able to generate the financial resources needed to carry out the Church’s many tasks due to a lack of property?
Cardinal Müller: The Church, as a community of grace, lives entirely of God’s loving care for us humans, but insofar as it is a visible sociological entity, it also needs the material means in this world to be able to fulfill its tasks. These are not only the alms that are collected for individual people in need, but also the structural prerequisites that must be in place (salaries, buildings, etc.). In this regard, all members of the Church have a moral duty to bear these material burdens within the scope of their possibilities, without charging God for it like a huckster. We owe everything to his grace, including the good works for which he has enabled and destined us. All the good things we do voluntarily are often returned to us by his grace and this makes us content and happy.
Rilinger: Do you think it is possible that Pope Francis, bearing in mind that he defines himself sociologically as a communist, consequently recommended that Ukraine, which was attacked by Russia in violation of international law, raise the white flag as an internationally recognized sign of surrender in order to enable the autocratically ruling Putin to win and thus put him in the position to annex Ukraine?
Cardinal Müller: I am personally of the opinion that in the rapid exchange of words during his interview he did not notice the ambivalent metaphor of the white flag. In concrete terms, it is difficult to decide when the fight for freedom is necessary and when resistance has become futile. But it is certainly now a matter of stopping the aggressor, for whom Ukraine is just an element in his geopolitical power game, and not settling for a cowardly and lazy “peace” that would only be total submission to brutal despotism.
Rilinger: This raises the question of the extent to which the Church, and in particular the Pope, should become politically involved in world politics, indeed, should he take sides for a party in a conflict or war, or should he rather use his high moral standing to mediate between the parties and call on both warring parties to conclude a just peace and on the aggressor to compensate for the damage inflicted in violation of international law?
Cardinal Müller: Yes, the Pope and also the bishops have a moral duty in Europe, which is still predominantly Christian, to outlaw war as a means of politics and to call on Christians worldwide to pray that God will instill thoughts of peace in the hearts of those responsible. Our 70-80 year old leaders in Washington, Moscow and Beijing must realize that from one moment to the next they must give an account before the judgment seat of God, where they can no longer hide behind the foolish propaganda of their spokespersons. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.” (2 Cor 5:10).
Rilinger: Your Eminence, thank you very much for your analysis.
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Says the cryptic Pope Francis: ““When I look at the Gospel sociologically, then yes, I am a communist, and Jesus is one, too.”
“Sociologically”?
An ideological fogginess clouded further by the incomparable Cardinal Hollerich, who would overturn human moral theology because—in the fluidity of history—its “sociological-scientific foundation” is no longer valid. https://www.newwaysministry.org/2022/02/04/leading-cardinal-in-synod-seeks-change-in-church-teachings-on-homosexuality/
Up until 2013 the “communist” Jesus Christ was sociologically a member of a family—the Holy Family….
But now, groomed by Hollerich & Co., the kissing Cardinal Fernandez even has part of a newly-divided Church blessing “irregular” pairings and especially anti-binary couples—as “couples.” Another gradualist step into socialism.
Writing in 1954 about the forwardist “intelligentsia of the West,” the ex-communist Whittaker Chambers observed: “If they could have Communism without the brutalities of ruling that the Russian experience bred, they would have only marginal objections. Why should they object? What else is socialism but Communism with the claws retracted?” (“Cold Friday,” 1964, pp. 225-6).
About backwardist forwardism over the past seventy years: “constant change is the deepest rut of all.”
I shared much of the following comment with CWR quite a while ago.
I think it bears repeating in light of the interview above.
It saddens me that there does not seem to be any inkling of the difference in kind between communism and Christianity in the halls of the Vatican or among our Church’s leaders, when the two world views are in fact absolute opposites:
* * *
Leftists have never understood the genius of capitalism.
They view work in a capitalistic system as nothing more than a burden, an occasion for the exploitation and predation of workers.
It somehow escapes them that the reason the standard of living goes up in a country is that workers are producing products and services — the good things that make people’s lives better and make societies thrive.
The fact is, leftists always focus on money. But, quite obviously, money produces nothing. Rather, it’s people who spend their days working their jobs who bring the good life.
At its core, leftism is unfair. In a system of distributive justice, everyone receives “the resources they need” — which always sounds wonderful. After all, who wants to see people in poverty?
But when everyone receives “enough,” it means that the lazy, unproductive, unreliable workers get the same pay as the dedicated, diligent, hard-working workers.
And psychologists will tell you that in a system that does not recognize and reward outstanding performance, the best participants come to understand that their extra efforts are wasted. And they will inevitably begin reverting to the mean — lackadaisical, subpar performance.
Which is why socialist countries always end up as varying degrees of gray, depressing and impoverished.
It’s inevitable.
Think about it. In Venezuela, all the workers — and the layabouts, for that matter — have “enough” money for “the resources they need.”
Just one problem. There aren’t enough of those “resources.”
The fact that everyone gets “enough” money, whether they work or not, ensures that many don’t work. And so there are severe shortages of products — including food — throughout the country.
And so what is your money worth when there’s nothing to buy, Mr. Leftist?
Leftists have no concept that capitalism’s genius is to align the interests of the individual with the interests of society.
People are rewarded for their hard work and productivity. And society benefits accordingly.
And people are also rewarded for their good ideas for new products or services — personal computers, online shopping, iPhones, whatever — according to the value that others place on them.
Finally, while leftists are obsessed with money, they have no idea of what money really is.
Money is a societally recognized abstraction for value produced. When a worker completes a job, he has delivered something that is of value to someone. That value created is reflected in the pay he receives.
When many workers create much value — producing food, fixing cars, replacing roofs, whatever — wealth is created. There’s lots of money to spread around, leading to more economic growth and cultivating a robust and prosperous economy.
When you hold a $100 bill in your hand, you’re in a very real sense touching the time and imagination and lives of countless individuals who contributed to all of the value which that bill has delivered since it was first created.
Leftists understand none of this.
Which is why socialist societies always, always, *always* end up oppressing their citizens.
For socialism to succeed, people must be forced to act in ways that are against their best interests. Whereas, under capitalism, people are free to pursue their best interests, wherever they perceive those interests leading them.
So what about the unfortunate individuals who for whatever reason are left behind in poverty within capitalist economies?
That’s where charity comes in. Virtue. Compassion.
Or, if you prefer, Christianity.
It’s worth noting that charity is also ennobling to those on both ends of the transaction, both the giver and the receiver. The giver feels good about helping someone, and the receiver feels worthwhile because he’s being blessed by a personal gesture of fellowship by another.
Charity is a virtue and is, therefore, of God.
Whereas government entitlements tend to rob an individual of his sense of accomplishment, of self-respect, of satisfaction. In fact, government handouts can prompt people to feel like victims and sullenly resent those who have more. In this way, they’re able to justify to themselves their dependency.
The sad fact is, distributive justice’s real effect is to make sure that everyone has “enough” of the scarcity, the poverty, and the starvation it inevitably produces.
Remember that Jesus never compelled anyone to act virtuously. He respected the dignity of each individual, realizing that coercion is the absolute end of virtue.
Perhaps it’s time to expect governments, which are definitively *not* divine, to act with at least the same level of restraint shown by the Savior of the universe.
Perhaps pure Capitalism and Communism are opposites, black and white if you will, but there are many shades between. Our Social Security for instance is a socialist construct within a Capitalist State. Europe has a wide variety of internal constructs depending on the country. It’s dangerous to broadbrush people and their ideas into categories of white and black, good and bad, Communism and Capitalism etc.. There are good and bad elements in both, and both in the extreme both are very dangerous. Both the extreme Right and the extreme Left are dangerous as we saw in the Reds and the Nazis in recent history. Both extremes lead to totalitarianism and loss of freedom. Freedom and sanity can be found somewhere on the continuum between them and we can disagree as to which point of compromise is best. What works today in this place may not work tomorrow in that place etc. We must be pragmatic and open to change, willing to listen, learn and compromise when necessary. We must be tolerant, humble and willing to dialogue without anger, labeling and character assassination. In short, we must be adult Christians who are willing to learn and admit our own limitations and faults. We are much to polarized for our own good. As Christians we must be much more loving and tolerant of those who disagree with us. We are in the world, but not of the world.
I think the blood of half of a billion people brutally and senselessly murdered by atheistic communist systems in the 20th Century argues pretty strongly against your rather childish platitudes.
It always ends up that way.
They are trying to sell a bill of goods, because it’s easier to brainwash with propaganda than have retaliation. They prefer to have everyone go along. Then the proverbial hammer drops.
People are so uneducated these days. I’m not referring to high IQs. Have no common sense or any interest in knowing about the world and especially HISTORY.
The Nazis were not “extreme right”. They were called the National Socialist party, after all. They definitely had major differences with Communists, but not in terms of the state controlling the economy.
More importantly, there IS no “right”. The supposed left-right axis is a fiction foisted on us by those who want us to believe there are only two alternatives – mostly the “Left” but also others. In fact the “Right” is a disparate set of people with widely-ranging views who agree on little more than (ostensible in some cases) opposition to socialism. Being lumped together reduces their effectiveness, which is just how socialists and their fellow travelers like it. Meanwhile, those who don’t seem to fit in to the dominant “Right” coalition are branded as “centrists” who can’t get traction with either side.
In short, the whole thing is a shell game, and we should stop playing. Just describe people’s political goals. It takes more work, but it’s more accurate.
Totalitarian is as totalitarian does.
Communism is to Christianity as the Devils are to the Trinity.
Many religious orders are “communistic “ are they evil?
Good grief. There is a very obvious difference between a community that shares certain things in common and the modern political ideology of communism. That’s 101.
For a good primer, read Pope Pius XI’s “Divini Redemptoris” (1937); here’s a taste:
Read the entire encyclical.
Communism (in all its forms) is a parasite on the Body of Christ, aping authentic Trinitarian communion. Communism is like rape as opposed to the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Catholic religious life requires freedom; communism requires slavery to the State.
On a personal note, as a political scientist and historian, the worst place I’ve been is the old Soviet Union in the early 80’s – except Rowanda just before the genocide.
Following Christ, the last person who would ever have been a communist was the Blessed Mother, or other saints like St. Francis of Assisi. Even politically, St. Francis lived the Gospel democratically with his brothers in freedom. St. Francis was no more a communist with his God-given brothers than Our Lord was with His disciples. What a grave evil to associate the word communist with Christ, or His great disciple, St. Francis of Assisi.
“When God gave me some friars, there was no one to tell me what I should do; but the Most High Himself made it clear to me that I must live the life of the Gospel.” (Testament of St. Francis)
Perhaps we could say that all Marxists are communist, but not all communists are Marxists. In fact, I’m not sure that any pure Marxists were really communists. I believe that they even admitted that the totalitarian state- with its intentional social struggle- was to be a temporary means to a platonic end (which so far has never been achieved; and indeed never will be because of our sinful nature.) Pure communism is to be found in monastic orders and other utilitarian communities. Participation should always be voluntary and not coerced- a self governing community within a secular government or state. We must avoid broad brushing people as being “communists “ without defining what we mean by “communist “ . We must differentiate the differences between communism , socialism, and Marxism, and the degrees within and the overlap between each “ism”. I have found over my 84 plus years that most human institutions are a mixture of good and bad and that I can learn a lot by trying to understand what another is trying to say. Generalizations and broad brushing are dangerous and lead to pride, hatred, and bigotry. As Christians we should avoid this and learn to dialogue without labeling. We can agree to disagree and still love the person.
Perhaps we get too caught up in the secular constructs of Socialism and Capitalism and forget that we, as Christians, walk a third way. We live in different societies which will always be selfish, and unjust to varying degrees because of inherent sin which is common to us all. We live IN them but are not apart Of them in the strictest sense . We are separate and must remain separate. Our compromises must be limited and our cooperation guarded.It is possible to live in voluntarily community life within either social construct (Capitalist or Communist) without being part of that construct which ever it may be. Wherever we live we must give Caesar his due, but without compromise. Thus it may be necessary to live as “voluntary Christian communists” within a secular Communist state”. Thus construct would also work within a Capitalist State. Communism isn’t necessarily Atheism or totalitarianism. It can be voluntary and Christian. It needn’t be only for celibates. Our religious orders are good examples of voluntary, religious socialism.The Hutarian brethren are good examples of voluntarily Christian family communities. Perhaps in the future as is Atheistic Secularism takes over the remaining democracies, Christians will have to band together communally in some form. Persecution may well split up families and force new social constructs. We must be pragmatic and practical as we look to the future and be willing to adapt and change. We must remember that we are IN the world, but not OF the world. As the old saying says “the world is not our home, we are just a passing through “. We are Pilgrims and Strangers.
Responding to your above two comments…Three points:
FIRST, Communism and Capitalism are not “opposites.” Or, more precisely, Communism and the non-ideological “Market Economy” are not opposites. The comparison is not symmetrical. The former denies the very nature of the human person (portrayed as a digit within the deterministic ideology of dialectical materialism). The latter is rooted in at least some degree of metaphysical reality affirming human freedom and responsibility.
This is why, in preparing the Church for the 21st Century, in “Centesimus Annus” (1991), St. Pope John Paul II stressed that the “Catholic Social Teaching” is the negation of all ideology (!), belonging instead as it does “to the field…of theology and particularly moral theology” (n. 54, citing and in continuity with “Rerum Novarum,” 1891). Something much more than a mixed “third way.”
Your points are well taken, but further…
SECOND, the same lack of conceptual symmetry is also imposed on Catholic readers by an ambiguous handling of a “pluralism of religions,” as implying an equivalence willed by God Almighty! The accurate comparison between Christianity and Islam, for example, is not to be found in a comparison between the two scriptures (the Bible and the Qur’an). The revealing comparison, so to speak, is the difference between the incarnate Jesus Christ and the Qur’an, the “Word made flesh” versus the “word made book.”
Lacking today in much monological “dialogue” is apples-and-oranges accuracy, a lack that is then larded over with words inventive of an imagined middle-ground. For example, the ecclesial non-blessing/blessing of couples that are simultaneously said to be and to not be “couples”; and then affirmations in “Dignitas Infinita,” but joined at the hip with the concurrent “Fiducia Supplicans”. The conjunction of double-vision and double-speak.
THIRD, at the risk of connecting too many dots, on your point of “black and white,” what can one possibly say of the flat-earth mental landscape of synodal ringmaster Cardinal Hollerich who substitutes the universal first principle of non-contradiction with this private revelation:
“In Japan, I got to know a different way of thinking. The Japanese don’t think in terms of the European logic of opposites. We say: It is black, therefore it is not white. The Japanese say: It is white, but maybe it is also black. You can combine opposites in Japan without changing your point of view.” https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/who-is-cardinal-hollerich.
Are the pygmies in charge?
James Connor,
Your assessment of communism and capitalism miss the mark.
As has been noted, communism has killed more than a hundred million people over the past century (source: ‘The Black Book of Communism’, by Stéphane Courtois, et al). This was inevitable, due, as you yourself said above, to our “fallen natures.”
(And that hundred million doesn’t even include the Billion children slaughtered around the world by the left’s abortion obsession over the past 51 years.)
And, in fact, when you made your fallen nature comment, you were on the brink of an insight, since the genius of capitalism is to perfectly align the interests of the individual with the interests of society.
When the individual does what is best for him or her (making money by working a job, inventing something useful, providing a service to his fellow citizens), all of society benefits.
Whereas, communism deprives the individual of any incentive to act in a way that benefits others. The labors of the individual are fruitless, meaningless, since those who are productive receive the same wage — “enough” — as those who do nothing.
And so communism forces individuals to act in ways that are not in line with their own interests.
Which is why communism must *always* be imposed by totalitarian governments at the muzzle of a gun.
The fact is, capitalism isn’t an ‘-ism’ at all. It’s just another word for economic freedom. People do whatever they please.
Ideally, if they are Christian, they give of their bounty to others who are struggling.
But they can work or not, whatever suits them.
All of which explains why I say communism and capitalism are opposites.
Let me recommend two books that should be read by anyone who remotely entertains an attraction to communism.
“The Devil and Karl Marx” by Paul Kengor. Marx is a real sweetheart. Never held a job and mooched off of people. In other words, the original Bernie Sanders.
The other is the recent “The Devil and Communist China” by Steven Mosher. Communism is to Christianity like Rap is to music.
Just like Marx, composer Richard Wagner lived in poverty and political exile due to his involvement with the 1848 revolutions. The only difference is that Wagner caught a big break around age 50 when King Ludwig of Bavaria started supporting him. By your logic, Wagner must have been a terrible composer because he wasn’t financially successful (or at least, his pre-Ludwig works, like Tristan und Isolde, were terrible). If Marx was a standard 1800s conservative-liberal, we would have had a cushy professor job at a German university and would not have been reduced to “mooching”.
I imagine if Marx instead had been born into the 20th century, he would have had a cushy professor job at a German university and would not have been reduced to “mooching”. And he would have found much comradeship.
🙂
If we are comparing Marx to Wagner, they were both antisemites, so they have that in common. Toss in that Wagner was a racist and Hitler’s favorite composer. But I digress. I’m not sure of the point you are trying to make. There are a lot of hard-working, talented people who never obtain material or financial success. Then there are lazy individuals who take advantage of the kindness of others, cheat on their spouses, and create an atheistic political system that resulted in the death of over 100-150 million people (and counting). Read Kengor’s book and get back to me.
I guess I’d choose Wagner over Marx. At least we gained some music from one of them. Tristan and Isolde beats gulags and mass starvation.
Anti Semitism and self hatred are things that can coexist in people like Marx.
Oddly enough Stephen Fry is a huge fan of Wagner in spite of Wagner’s anti Semitism. He made a film about his pilgrimage to hear Wagner’s operas.
Perhaps there are folks who make pilgrimages to places associated with Marx also, I don’t know.
Cardinal Muller: The man who shoukd have been Pope.
Q: Are communism and Christianity compatible?
A: No.
Next question
Most “Marxists” today are either social democrats or market socialists. The former support policies that Muller, as a German raised in the post-war era, would probably agree with and take for granted. Catholic Christian Democrats like Konrad Adenauer worked with social democrats in building the modern German social market economy, complete with a big welfare state, strong labor unions, and an active Keynesian government role in the economy. One Catholic-influenced policy in Germany is the requirement that larger corporations have union representatives on their boards of directors. One of the few US politicians to support this idea is Bernie Sanders.
Market socialists, like David Schweickart, while more extreme than social democrats, oppose Soviet-style central planning and conceive of a market economy dominated by worker cooperatives similar to the Mondragon Corporation instead of joint-stock corporations. These views share a lot of similarity with distributism and Catholic Social Teaching.
“Marxism” and “communism” are buzzwords used by US conservatives to equate anything left of Paul Ryan with Stalin and Pol Pot.
Right. Just ignore the extermination of hundreds of millions of people in service to the communist agenda during the 20th Century. That’s just a “buzzword.”
But Marxism/socialism is not merely an economic system or approach to economics. At its heart, it’s an anthropological heresy and, as Fulton Sheen observed many decades ago, “a complete philosophy of life” that “seeks not only to dominate the periphery of life but to control man’s inner life as well.” (Interestingly enough, Sheen readily acknowledged that “the only place in the world where communism works is in a convert, for there the basis of having everything in common is that no one wants anything.”)
And:
Which is quite fascinating, as Sheen was writing before the ideas of Antonio Francesco Gramsci (d. 1936), Herbert Marcuse (d. 1979), and others became the basis for neo-Marxist movements seeking to infiltrate and undermine cultural institutions, especially schools, but also businesses, government, etc. And that is where the war has been waged for a longtime now. So, yes, we’re talking about cultural Marxism, which is very real and has been around for decades:
Abp. Sheen was talking about Soviet-style State Socialism, at a time when it was a major threat. Gramsci was a State Socialist who wanted Italy to become a command economy and join the Warsaw Pact. He wasn’t a liberal business executive who used pronouns and voted for Biden–that’s not “cultural Marxism”. Sheen was not talking about the UK Labour Party or US New Dealers or West German Social Democrats (groups/parties that included plenty of Catholics), much less the center-right parties that by the 50s had largely accepted social democratic reforms.
If I am a US politician in 2024, and I support the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or a single-payer healthcare system, or paid family leave, or raising the minimum wage, or having union reps on corporate boards of directors, am I therefore drafted into a totalizing atheistic ideology? In practical terms, these policies are what “socialism” is now. Is making it slightly easier to organize a labor union or expanding Medicare the “suffocation of human personality and its subsequent absorption into the mass”?
When US conservatives use the word “socialism”, its a rhetorical trick to confound what I discussed above (PRO Act, etc.) with Stalin and militant totalitarian atheism, so Catholic/evangelical voters stay on the GOP/Wall St. Journal reservation rather than consider voting for a Democrat or trying to move the GOP towards the left on economics. That’s why you get articles like this in conservative Catholic publications and books like Paul Kengor’s. Card. Muller, being a German who takes social democracy for granted, is probably ignorant of this whole context.
When i was in Jesuit high school in the 1960s, some of my Jesuit teachers would make a speil that socialism is the only authentically Christian economic system. At the time i thought it was an absurd claim, and 60 years later, after all the receipts have come in on how socialism destroys people’s lives, it is laughably absurd. Alas, that our current Jesuit pontiff would utter such clap trap, simply shows how thoroughly foolish, and gnostic, the once great Jesuit schools have become.
As one with a PhD in Modern European history, with an emphasis on Russian and Germany, as well as seminary education, I find this essay is both brilliant and profound. His knowledge and insights are amazing and combined with his faith and theological knowledge are compelling.
BREAKING NEWS: Pontiff Francis ADMITS he is a Marxist.
NOT NEWS: Everyone already knew Pontiff Francis was a Marxist, because he has the same mind and heart as his long-time friend, the sociopathic sex abusing fraud [un]Eminence McCarrick, who was obviously (voluntarily or involuntarily) in the decades-long-servitude to the Chinese Communist Party.
“When God is denied, human Dignity disappears.” -Pope Benedict XVI Christmas Address 2012
Communism is what communism does, by denying God, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity,The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, it denies the inherent Dignity of the human person, and anything can become permissible, including the destruction of a beloved son or daughter residing in their mother’s womb.
I do not think Pope Francis thinks things through to completeness.
Even after a decade, we underestimate the Pope. His mess distracts and encourages inaction. He got second in the 2005 conclave. At a minimum, he and Tucho have been planning for decades. Amoris Laetitia is the key to circumventing all moral doctrine in practice. Time is greater than space. 💋
“Time is greater than space. “
How can this be, if with Time, The Universe is expanding?
All Moral Doctrine, in Heaven and on Earth, begins and ends with God, The Ordered Communion Of Perfect Complementary Love, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), and although, at the end of the Day, it may still be a Great Mystery, it is no mystery, that we exist, because Perfect Love exists.
The simplicity of “the Most Holy and Undivided Blessed Trinity” is that He does what He Is, and Is what He does. “God is love” (1 Jn 4:14).
And, about “time is greater than space;” this is not physics, as in cosmic expansion, but rather code language in academia for holding that even permanent truths are eroded by the passage of historical time. Evolution is the universal truth, I mean the universal solvent. Truth is culturally conditioned and reducible to simply one phase of history or another. We are not only “in” the world but now also nothing more than “of” the world: “historicism,” and what Benedict XVI diagnosed as the “tyranny of relativism.”
A synodal “paradigm shift,” anyone? Instead of doing what we believe, we believe what we do?
If surely “not a parliament,” then maybe a plebiscite, and maybe someday with nude Pachamama in polyester pants and collar? Or, maybe a carefully screened Politburo of instep “experts” and “study groups”?
The one sticking point to collaboration without contours is the sacramental Apostolic Succession–with each bishop accountable (to God!) for institutional/personal responsibilities that cannot be delegated or usurped. Something like what a “father” used to be within what used to be a family—before sex was objectified and marriage irregularized.
And before pairs of interchangeable men self-identified as “husband” and “wife,” and became blessed as “couples”—informally, spontaneously and without scandal, of course.
It is absolutely essential to read the entire interview yourself and also read it in context of what was said in answer to all questioners. These people don’t stay on one topic but jump back and forth. The editor’s first line has the “I am communist” quote but you must look at the beginning of the first paragraph below it which starts with the words “with this dictum”. The “this Dictum” is in a faint red so it can be easily missed but you click on those two words to be transferred to Pope Francis’ actual interview. I recommend that the interview be downloaded and that notes be made in the margins to indicate the topic at that point so that they can each be combined later to put everything in context.
The contextual part of the interview reads as follows:
“I always ask myself, where does this labeling come from? For example, when we were returning from Ireland on the plane, a letter from an American prelate erupted that said all kinds of things about me. I try to follow the Gospel. I am much enlightened by the Beatitudes, but above all by the standard by which we will be judged: Matthew 25. ‘I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was in prison, and you visited me. I was sick and you cared for me.’ Is Jesus a communist, then? The problem that is behind this, that you have rightly touched on, is the socio-political reduction of the Gospel message. If I see the Gospel in a sociological way only, yes, I am a communist, and so too is Jesus. Behind these Beatitudes and Matthew 25 there is a message that is Jesus’ own. And that is to be Christian. The communists stole some of our Christian values. [Laughter.] Some others, they made a disaster out of them.”
How does even a “sociological” reading of the Gospel lead to actually being a communist? Better to say that political science and sociology are both ivory-tower subsets of less elitist human anthropology—and that secular anthropology is a fragment and falsification of the true Christian anthropology. Another squandered teachable moment…
In his fixation, instead, on the concrete and on one-line memes, in his mind Pope Francis frequently switches the part for the whole. From this backwards (!) mindset cometh forth his so-called ambiguities. The real context is that occupant of the papal chair ought to think more clearly and speak less flippantly. Yes, “communists stole some of our Christian values [laughter],” but why “walk together” to hand them out freely like eyeball candy?
It’s almost like the 2018 Synod on Young People where Pope Francis exchanged (!) the papal crozier for a Wiccan Stang.
Marx admitted that 19th century laissez-faire capitalism created more wealth than all the previous centuries combined. A rather devastating admission to make for someone who opposes capitalism. So then what’s the problem with capitalism? According to Marx, the fantastic amount of wealth created in the 19th century all went into the hands of tiny group of rich exploiters. The oppressed masses never benefited from any of this. Absolutely ridiculous.