Bishop Robert Barron tweeted in response to Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural address last week, accomplishing something increasingly rare in public discourse, since he cut through rhetorical fog and exposed a philosophical fault line that modern politics bends over backwards to obscure.
When Mamdani announced his intention to replace what he called “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” the line sounded poetic, therapeutic, morally self-assured, and even politically superior. Therefore, it also revealed a stunning ignorance of history paired with an astonishing confidence in moral abstraction. Bishop Barron’s response, sharp without theatrical outrage, reminded readers that collectivism carries a historical body count measured in the tens of millions and a moral logic that consistently devours the human person it claims to protect.
The phrase “warmth of collectivism” works precisely because it trades on emotional suggestion rather than historical memory. Collectivism consistently presents itself as humane, relational, and morally elevated, while individual freedom gets caricatured as cold, atomized, and socially corrosive. Consequently, the debate begins on sentimental terrain rather than factual, historical ground.
The twentieth century offers abundant clarity on where collectivist “warmth” leads once translated into policy, slaughter, power, and coercion. From the Soviet Union to Maoist China, from Pol Pot’s Cambodia to Castro’s Cuba, collectivist systems required the systematic, widespread erasure of dissent, the flattening of human difference, and the subordination of conscience to ideology. Marx was unambiguous about the centrality of force in coercing collectivism, writing, “the [socialist] unity is brought about by force,”1 and “we have no compassion, and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”2 The only warmth collectivism has consistently provided has come as the result of hot lead proceeding from the barrel of government-directed rifles.
History proves that these outcomes occurred by design rather than accident, since collectivism demands a totalizing vision of the good enforced through centralized authority.
Bishop Barron’s frustration arises from a deeper misrepresentation embedded in Mamdani’s language. The target of his condemnation, “rugged individualism,” appears as a straw figure rather than a serious engagement with economic history or Christian social teaching. What Mamdani describes as frigidity more closely resembles a moral rejection of the market economy itself, along with the human ingenuity, creativity, innovation, and upward mobility that market systems unleash when paired with moral norms and limited government. Therefore, his critique drifts toward an implicit condemnation of private initiative, private wealth, and voluntary exchange, which Catholic social teaching has repeatedly defended as expressions of human dignity rather than threats to it.
The Church’s engagement with economic life has always resisted ideological extremes. Catholic social teaching affirms the human person as creative, relational, and responsible, which leads to an affirmation of economic freedom driven by human dignity and ordered toward the common good.
This position finds one of its clearest articulations in Centesimus Annus, where John Paul II explicitly praises the market economy as the system that best recognizes the role of human creativity, initiative, and responsibility in economic life. The encyclical emphasizes that economic freedom flows from the truth about the human person as a moral agent capable of industry, innovation, cooperation, and stewardship. Consequently, the market emerges as a moral arena requiring virtue rather than a moral vacuum requiring replacement.
This vision stands in direct contrast to collectivist frameworks that reduce the human person to a unit of production or a recipient of state provision. Collectivism fails to account for human creativity apart from centralized planning, which inevitably leads to stagnation, coercion, cultural decay, and mass murder. Economic history repeatedly demonstrates that societies embracing market freedom within moral and legal constraints generate wealth, reduce poverty, and foster innovation at scales collectivist systems fail to approach. Therefore, to dismiss market economies as morally frigid requires either obtuse historical amnesia or ideological commitment strong enough to deceptively override evidence.
I wish to be clear here: Christian thought simultaneously refuses to baptize radical individualism. The human person never exists in isolation, nor does human flourishing arise from self-enclosed autonomy. The Christian revelation presents this tension between the one and the many, between individual goods and the common good. Christianity addresses this tension by rejecting false binaries rather than oscillating between them. This insight finds imaginative expression in the literature of Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis, whose fictional worlds, explored by Jordan Ballor, expose the spiritual dangers lurking at both extremes.
In A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle presents Camazotz as a vision of collectivist perfection that achieves harmony through the annihilation of individuality. The planet operates under a single mind, enforcing uniformity in thought, movement, and desire. Order replaces freedom, efficiency replaces love, and obedience replaces conscience. The horror of Camazotz arises from its false peace, since difference becomes disorder and personality becomes pathology. L’Engle’s portrayal exposes collectivism as a spiritual project seeking salvation through control, where unity emerges through coercion rather than communion.
Lewis offers a complementary warning in The Great Divorce, where hell manifests as radical and absolute self-sovereignty. Each soul retreats into private worlds shaped entirely by personal grievance, resentment, or pride. Distance replaces community, autonomy replaces love, and isolation becomes self-imposed. Lewis reveals that individualism unmoored from truth dissolves the very relationships that make individuality meaningful. Consequently, hell becomes an infinite suburb of loneliness, where every person reigns supreme over nothing but their own emptiness.
Together, L’Engle and Lewis illuminate the Christian refusal to choose between collectivism and individualism. Christianity affirms the human person as irreducibly unique and irreducibly relational. Genesis presents humanity created in God’s image, entrusted with stewardship over creation, and embedded within networks of relationship from the beginning. The biblical vision locates dignity in personhood rather than productivity, while locating flourishing within community rather than absorption. Therefore, the common good emerges as a moral horizon shaped by justice, charity, and responsibility rather than an abstract total imposed from above.
Social institutions play a decisive role in this framework. Families, churches, schools, businesses, and civic associations mediate between the individual and the state, preserving freedom while cultivating responsibility. Catholic social teaching emphasizes subsidiarity precisely because it protects human creativity at local levels while resisting bureaucratic centralization. When these mediating institutions flourish, societies experience both solidarity and freedom. When they erode, individuals become vulnerable to state expansion or cultural fragmentation.
Mamdani’s rhetoric overlooks this institutional economy entirely. His invocation of collectivist “warmth” suggests a society where moral responsibility flows upward toward centralized authority rather than outward through voluntary association. Such a vision treats government as the primary engine of the common good rather than one participant among many. History shows that this inversion consistently leads to moral infantilization, economic inefficiency, and political coercion. Therefore, Barron’s exasperation reflects more than ideological disagreement. It reflects concern over the repetition of historical intellectual errors whose consequences remain visible in bloodshed across continents and generations.
The Church’s favorable stance toward the market economy arises from theological anthropology rather than partisan allegiance. Markets recognize that human beings possess intelligence, creativity, and moral agency. They allow individuals to cooperate freely, take risks, create value, and serve one another through exchange. When ordered by virtue and justice, market systems harness human potential in ways collectivist planning consistently suppresses. This affirmation never denies the need for moral limits, social safety nets, or communal responsibility. It insists instead that dignity flourishes through participation rather than dependency.
Therefore, the supposed “frigidity” Mamdani condemns reflects a misunderstanding of freedom itself. Economic liberty, rightly understood, affirms the human capacity to imagine, build, and contribute. It allows people to rise through effort, creativity, and cooperation rather than political favor. The Church has consistently defended this vision precisely because it aligns with a view of the human person as co-creator, steward, and moral agent before God.
Barron’s closing plea, exasperated yet grounded, resonates because it speaks from historical awareness rather than ideological enthusiasm. The warmth of collectivism has repeatedly arrived hand in hand with repression, organized massacre, scarcity, and cultural flattening. The market economy, imperfect yet resilient, continues to affirm human dignity through freedom ordered toward responsibility. Christianity, standing apart from ideological extremes, offers a richer vision still, one where love rather than control binds the one and the many into a genuine common good.
Then again, Mamdani might respond by simply saying collectivist warmth has never been truly tried before, and that he will be the first in history to finally get the experiment right. When that endeavor inevitably fails, may there be a reawakening in the Western imagination.
Endnotes:
1Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1973), Notebook I, “The Chapter on Money.”
2 Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, November 1848, republished in Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (Cologne, 1849), available on the Marxists Internet Archive.
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“. . . he will be the first in history to finally get the experiment right”.
Touche.
Kudos to both Bishop Barron and Dr. Peter.
I agree. Many thanks to Bishop Barron for his timely and superbly appropriate public comments and to Dr. Peter for his brilliant analysis.
I’m reminded of Chesterton’s statement that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” By contrast, collectivism has been tried and found wanting many times in human history and, worse, has always destroyed human freedom and human lives.
Welcome to the disaster of Islamic communism!
j: The Islamic threat is far from Communism.
Let me be clear, I am in no way implying that Communism is not a threat. I’m only stating that they are two very different ideologies and are in no way compatible. Oil and water don’t mix.
Not at all. Read “The Grand Jihad” by Andrew C McCarthy for one
Thank you for this reminder, Dr. Peter. The horrors of collectivism can be seen very close, across the Straight of Florida. See this article “Escaping Havana,” a review of a revealing film that won prizes at the prestigious German film festival of Tribeca:
https://lawliberty.org/author/dario-fernandez-morera/
My speller corrected strait to straight; my fault for not revising. My excuse is that my eyesight is deteriorating rapidly.
Socialism is not the answer. That said, late stage, cutthroat capitalism is not either.
Explain to us what “late stage” capitalism is.
You throw a lot of jargon around in an attempted to appear informed, but it just reveals your indoctrination.
Latest stage capitalism is characterized by non productive actions to make money. For example, stock buybacks to artificially inflate the earnings per share, leveraged buyouts where a company is purchased with borrowed money, saddled with the debt and left in bad shape while the new owners profit greatly. Cryptocurrency is a scam, it makes money for the insiders while most investors get little or nothing.
I don’t throw around “jargon” and never said I was informed. As Yogi Berra said “you can observe a lot by watching.” And I have been watching for a good, many years. So I am “indoctrinated?” Who indoctrinated me? The Wall St Journal? Forbes? What pseudo Marxist organization brainwashed me? By the way, I smell a market correction coming soon, so I dumped a lot of stock and went with annuities and T-bills. I’m not a socialist, just a cynical investor.
It’s not a matter of socialism vs “cutthroat” capitalism. It is a matter of freedom to choose. When the State dogmatically and dictatorially imposes a system on its people without their consent, it is plainly wrong. The voters in NYC have chosen socialism as the system by which they prefer to be governed. They must be permitted to live with the consequences of their choice. Free and untampered elections are a must.
“They must be permitted to live with the consequences of their choice”
And yet, “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with The Truth”, and thus we can know through both Faith and reason, that the end goal of collectivism, where the State becomes “god”, is atheistic materialism, which one could argue is establishing a “state religion” in direct conflict with The Constitution Of The United States Of America, which recognizes our inherent unalienable Right to Life, the securing and protection upon which securing and protecting our inherent Right to Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness depends, is endowed to us from God with the capital G.
As a defender of market economics vs socialism, I submit the question is more than freedom to choose and its potential abuse. The founders acknowledged the dangers of their experiment in freedom they launched. They recognized that the best a legitimate government could hope for is to develop a civilization where it becomes easier for people to become good because personal heroic virtue would provide the primary corrective to vice. Many of the founders are inaccurately described as deists, ignoring how a mind is not categorically limited. Protestant Christians and rationalists among them both recognized the Catholic concept of original sin. They knew of the risks of future injustices by the strong abusing the weak, and the robber barons of the nineteenth century validated this concern. A large part of their delegation of powers to the states was conceived for regional adjudications of injustices, but the reverse was also possible.
Injustices can as easily be performed by government and freely voted in. “Sophisticated” New Yorkers, including many among the well-educated, can engage in group stupidity placing their outwardly projected monetary frustrations towards their disappointing private sector jobs, quite different from some overcompensated Wall Street manipulators, and demand permanent rescue by government regardless of any debt catastrophes blissfully ignored.
To quote H. L. Mencken: “democracy is the art of finding out what the people want, and giving it to them, good and hard.” Yes, the people of NY City wanted this, so let them have it, good and hard.
Yes: “Christianity standing apart from ideological extremes…”
And where, pray tell, is this “cut throat capitalism” being practiced today? Business has always been survival of the fittest. It’s not a charity.
Sins of pride will never be acknowledged nor abandoned by those who identify themselves as compassionate merely for demanding policies that don’t require any personal sacrifice of their own but are presented as benevolent by political demagogues who also don’t require and personal sacrifice of their own, while they both label rational opposition, cognizant of counterproductive results, as devoid of compassion.
“Sins of pride will never be acknowledged nor abandoned by those who identify themselves as compassionate merely for demanding policies that don’t require any personal sacrifice of their own”
It’s a distilled version of the telescopic philanthropy of Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellyby of Dickens’ Bleak House. At least those characters were portrayed as actually parting with personal wealth to assist the Tockahoopo Indians and tribes of Borrioboola-Gha in Africa.
We just witnessed a variant of this with “I support Ukraine” emojis. Didn’t do a damn thing to end the war, but oh my, they they could congratulate themselves on their righteous attitude.
Edward Baker: Brilliantly said!!!
Thanks for your kindness. Too bad I almost always leave a word error when I compose a post on my mobile device without my glasses and inaccurately tap the suggested word for convenience.
“political demagogues who also don’t require and personal sacrifice of their own” should read any in place of “and” to describe their narcissism.
Bravo Bishop Barron. Bravo!
“Barron’s closing plea, exasperated yet grounded, resonates because it speaks from historical awareness rather than ideological enthusiasm. The warmth of collectivism has repeatedly arrived hand in hand with repression, organized massacre, scarcity, and cultural flattening. The market economy, imperfect yet resilient, continues to affirm human dignity through freedom ordered toward responsibility. Christianity, standing apart from ideological extremes, offers a richer vision still, one where love rather than control binds the one and the many into a genuine common good.”
Pope Benedict XVI, identified the ramifications of Relativism when The State becomes “god”
“When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker Himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.” – Christmas Greetings to the members of The Roman Curia, December 21, 2012
Thank you for this post, Dr. Peter, on Bishop Barron’s public response addressing the evils of an ideology that stands opposed to human flourishing.
Capitalism is a the tide that can lift all boats as long as it is connected to Christian principles. There is a fairness and equality to an exchange where I give you something and you give me something. But if capitalism becomes unmoored from Christian principles and dishonesty and greed underlay a transaction, then capitalism becomes corrupt. To a certain degree, the latter is our current situation. This greed even permeates our government and welfare system.
Collectivism and the Common Good essentially differ in that the Christian principle of the common good protects the inherent rights of the individual, while Marxist collectivism does not.
The Church’s favorable stance toward the market economy arises from theological anthropology rather than partisan allegiance
How to square this statement with Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno?
109. The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are those which you yourselves, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Children, see and deplore: Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel. To these are to be added the grave evils that have resulted from an intermingling and shameful confusion of the functions and duties of public authority with those of the economic sphere – such as, one of the worst, the virtual degradation of the majesty of the State, which although it ought to sit on high like a queen and supreme arbitress, free from all partiality and intent upon the one common good and justice, is become a slave, surrendered and delivered to the passions and greed of men.
That’s a great question and the answer is in the paragraph you cited. The Church doesn’t condemn free market enterprise. It does, however, condemn crony capitalism. That distinction is what Pius XI is condemning as economic dictatorship. It’s not a condemnation of the free market itself, but the problems a lack of virtue will create even within a free market system.
Dr. Peter,
Thank you for your response back. I probably should have included more citations from QA but I don’t think we can say that that encyclical merely condemns “crony capitalism”.
the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. Destroying through forgetfulness or ignorance the social and moral character of economic life, it held that economic life must be considered and treated as altogether free from and independent of public authority, because in the market, i.e., in the free struggle of competitors, it would have a principle of self direction which governs it much more perfectly than would the intervention of any created intellect. But free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life – a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle. QA 88.
This passage in particular would rule out all forms of libertarianism, liberal capitalism etc. Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Friedman and their acolytes all would have to disagree with this.
We all belong to collectives. They are generally good things. Even the Church is a collective. What’s often forgotten is that these collectives are VOLUNTARY. The kind of collective Mamdani describes is fundamentally different: it is a forced collective, backed by the coercive powers of the State. That is an entirely different animal.
Why don’t we Catholics take a page from the Amish. They are not averse to capitalism (I know first-hand as I paid them $20,000 to construct an artist’s studio on our property). And yet, they’re supremely communitarian – assisting one another in their community as their needs warrant.