Catholicism vs. Communism (#172)

[00:00:00] If you ache for truth, goodness, and beauty. If you're hungry for a Christianity with substance and strength. If you long for a faith that's big and bold and biblical and all about Jesus Christ. If you're inspired by the idea of one church that has spanned 20 centuries, 24 time zones, and 2 hemispheres, enfolding every race, nation, and language, then you're considering Catholicism.

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Okay, now for today's topic. I want to say, "Marxism is in the news again", but that would be kind of silly, because since 1848, when Karl Marx wrote the [00:02:00] Communist Manifesto, it's never left the news. But in the last year or so There's been a flare up of attention to what we might call cultural Marxism. The movement that has come to be called Woke or Wokeism, the D. E. I. movement, Radical social justice ideologies and some of the open borders doctrines, all of these are interwoven with a Marxist worldview. 

Now, every single pope since the birth of Marxism in the mid 1800s has explicitly condemned it as antithetical to Christianity in general and to Catholicism in particular. And the Catechism of the Catholic Church, while not using the word Marxism, repudiates its central doctrines point by point. Historically, every Marxist government in the last 100 years around the world has persecuted Christianity and Catholicism in particular.[00:03:00] 

And yet some Catholics keep trying to reconcile or promote this worldview, this ideology, this pseudo religion that is diametrically opposed to our faith. They confuse it with the principles of Catholic social justice, or they pretend that Marxism is nothing more than promoting human dignity and equality. But nothing could be further from the truth. 

Now, because of some stories in the news this week, I thought that I would reach way, way back into the archives and share an excerpt from one of the earliest episodes of this podcast in which I explained in careful detail why Catholic Christianity and Marxism can never be reconciled. They are fundamentally, essentially, by definition, Completely opposite worldviews.

Here's that excerpt. [00:04:00] 

Is Marxism Christianity's greatest competitor in our age? I don't know. Maybe. Marxism, in its various forms, is one of the dominant worldviews that contradicts or opposes Christianity. The version of cultural Marxism that we've seen in America over the last couple of generations, what some people are calling Wokeness, is just another head of the Marxist Hydra.

For 170 plus years, whole swathes of this planet and the course of human history have been deeply affected by the Marxist worldview. So, yeah, to some extent, it certainly is one of Christianity's great contenders during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. But before we go any further, let me make three quick disclaimers.

[00:05:00] First, Marxism is a very imprecise label, but I don't have a better one, so I'm going with it. Just remember that it's more of a bucket of ideologies, a Frankenstein monster of ideas that were animated like Frankenstein's monster in the movies by a jolt of lightning from Karl Marx in the mid 1800s, and have been running amok ever since, wreaking havoc in the world.

Second, Marxism, including cultural Marxism. is not the same thing as having a Christian social conscience. Marxism is not social compassion. In fact, true Marxism exhibits little, if any, actual compassion for individual persons, because it considers compassion an artifact of religion, which is its sworn enemy.

Advocating for the poor and disenfranchised is not Marxism. Nor is favoring more generous government welfare programs. Sometimes, at some points, it [00:06:00] gets a little confusing because Marxism might share a talking point with Catholic social teaching like, like a critique of economic systems that perpetuate poverty.

But let me be clear. Marxism and true Catholic social teaching are always and everywhere fundamentally, philosophically opposed and incompatible. Third, the opposite of Marxism is not necessarily capitalism as we know it. It's easy to get confused because capitalism was Marx's original target, but Catholicism has flourished under systems other than capitalism.

For example, it flourished under feudalism during the Middle Ages. And today, cultural Marxism is flourishing under corporate capitalism. So we have to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that if you oppose Marxism, you must also fully embrace the corporate capitalist model. That's a false dichotomy, and it's led to a [00:07:00] misunderstanding in the USA of the teachings of the recent popes, most of whom criticized both Marxism and various forms of capitalism.

Okay, with those disclaimers out of the way, what is the Marxist worldview? To explain the Marxist worldview, let's start with how truth works in the Christian worldview. In Christianity, and in Catholicism in particular, truth is fixed and constant. Because it comes from God. Catholic philosophers like Saints Anselm and Aquinas explained that truth is absolute and transcendent.

Humans don't invent it, they discover it. For example, consider the statement 2 plus 2 equals 4. Catholicism would say that no one invented that 2 plus 2 equals 4. It was discovered. It was true before mankind discovered it. And it would be true if no one had ever discovered it at [00:08:00] all. The challenge for humanity in the Catholic worldview is to peer through the fog of sin to see truth, goodness, and beauty emerge like coastal hills from the deck of an approaching ship.

But in the late 1700s and early 1800s, a philosophical movement arose in Europe that rejected the historic Catholic understanding of truth and how we discover it. Now, if this was a history of philosophy course, which it isn't, I'd mention the names of philosophers from the period like Descartes, and Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and Hegel.

And then came Marx. Karl Marx was a German philosopher, born in 1818, died in 1883, whose most famous work was a pamphlet titled The Communist Manifesto. After he published it, the German government exiled him, and he spent the rest of his life in London, writing a really long, really dense book called [00:09:00] Das Kapital.

Now Marx wasn't the best philosopher, but as they say, timing is everything. And Marx's books were published at the right time and at the right place to sort of ride the wave of revolutionary ideas and events that were turning the world upside down at the time. Marxism captured and catalyzed a worldview that had been emerging for a very long time and had a lot of momentum behind it.

So, I'm just going to characterize it as Marxism, even though it's had a lot of contributors before and since. Marxism rejects the Catholic approach to truth and human knowledge in favor of something that has been called dialectic historical materialism. It's the foundation of the Marxist worldview. So let's take on these three terms to understand why they are fundamentally opposed to Catholicism.

Let's start with dialecticism. In Catholicism, truth is transcendent and absolute. [00:10:00] In the Marxist worldview Truth evolves into whatever it needs to be through a process called the dialectic. Supposed truths are just ideas or propaganda, social constructs, used to dominate and control people and groups until they are overthrown by counter ideas that allow the oppressed to regain control.

Then the oppressed become the oppressors until new truths overthrow them. In this Marxist dialectic, truth is measured by its usefulness in gaining power, and it evolves over time through a continual process of revolution and counter revolution. Second, materialism. In Marxism, there is no afterlife, no soul, no supernatural, no God, no transcendent realm of truth, goodness, and beauty.

All that exists, and all that counts, [00:11:00] is the material world. And life is a struggle for control of the material world. For land, resources, wealth, prestige, power, religion, and Catholicism in particular, is a lie concocted by the priests used to preserve their power of the ruling elite by deluding and oppressing the people.

It's the opiate of the masses. In Marxism, religion isn't just the Bible, Jesus worship, etc. Religion includes for Marxists the family and sexual morality, all of which they say was invented to control the people and keep them from organizing to overthrow the priestly elite and the wealthy classes.

Finally, historicalism. Now, others had made the two points above, but Marx's really big idea was that the revolutionary struggle for power over the material world and the propaganda struggle for truth that enabled groups to gain power and keep [00:12:00] power. was evolutionary. Through these dialectic processes, the world was evolving, ever closer to some utopia, in which mankind would live in an ideal state.

Not unlike the ideal state before the oppressive structures of religion and civilization seized power. In this ideal state, there would be no private property, no government, no religion, no sexual morality or nuclear family. John Lennon's song, Imagine, is a Marxist hymn. No heaven or hell, no struggle, no control, just a brotherhood of mankind.

A vast collective enjoying materialist pleasure. Of course, it would take an elite and enlightened few With the vision and power to bring all of this about, to organize and maintain this utopia, some comrades would have to be more equal than others in [00:13:00] order to protect equality for all. In Marx's historical materialism, ultimate loyalty must be given to the state, which is the substance and guarantor of this utopia.

In Marxism, the biggest enemy of the revolutionary utopian state is Christianity, particularly Catholicism, which cultivates in people an ultimate loyalty to God and transcendent and absolute values like truth, goodness, and beauty. The church, family, human rights, all of these are challenges to the power of the state and must be either marginalized or crushed.

It is no exaggeration to say that this Marxist worldview is religious. On every article of the historic Christian faith, it asserts a counter narrative, a dialectic opposite, a completely different worldview. On the nature of the universe, of truth, the value of human life, of morality, the family, [00:14:00] the human community, of social teaching, of the destiny of the world.

Marxism worships the god of historical progress, defined as the liberation of collectivist mankind. A favorite catchphrase of cultural Marxists today is, the arc of history bends towards justice. 

Okay, so let's put all of this together and list the main doctrines of the Marxist worldview and how they differ from the Catholic Christian worldview.

Now, this could be a whole multi part course, but for our purposes, here are eight key points of difference between Marxism and Catholicism. Marxism is materialist. 

Marxism rejects the supernatural and supernatural religion, and thus it is atheistic. And this has all sorts of implications. For example, human persons don't have immortal souls or [00:15:00] transcendent value. They're just functional units like ants in a colony, without inherent dignity or rights given to them by a creator. There are no transcendent truths. And perhaps, most importantly, the only things that matter are material, the things of this life. Thus, atheistic Marxism is obsessed with politics, because if only this world exists, then controlling this world is the only thing that matters. Politics becomes a substitute for religion. It is Marxist religion. Catholicism, on the other hand, believes that the world that we can see, feel, and touch is only part of a larger created reality, both visible and invisible to us, and outside of that creation is its creator. These larger transcendent truths give meaning and purpose to the material world, and guide how we understand it [00:16:00] and behave within it.

Second, Marxism is dialectical. Marxism sees reality as a perpetual conflict between opposing sides, and thus reality and human history are always evolving from this essential conflict. And so conflict and struggle are not only intrinsic to the Marxist worldview, they are actually desirable, because conflict is the engine of evolution. The Marxist worldview frames everything, every relationship, as a struggle. For non Marxists, their need to pick fights is, well, it's exhausting for everyone around them. But within their worldview, it's what gives life meaning and purpose. Catholicism, on the other hand, sees truth as a constant derived from the Creator, not an evolutionary struggle. Conflict for Catholics is a result of turning away from the Creator, a function of sin that [00:17:00] came from the fall from grace. Christ came not to perpetuate a struggle, but to end it. He calls us to peace and offers us a way to reach it. 

Third, Marxism is oriented toward power. Because it is materialistic, atheistic, and assumes that the universe is driven by evolutionary struggle. Marxism sees all reality, all human history, all human relationships in terms of power dynamics. The dialectic struggle is always framed in terms of an oppressor who has power and the oppressed who doesn't. Even when Marxists actually have power in government, academia, the media, whatever, they frame themselves as either the oppressed or fighting on behalf of the oppressed. In the Marxist worldview, there is always an oppressive boogeyman lurking in the shadows, and they need power to fight him. [00:18:00] Catholicism, on the other hand, follows a savior who came to serve, to give of himself, who died with other men's spit in his beard. Christ's first and greatest disciple, his own mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is the model of selfless submission to the will of God. The Lives of the Saints are stories of ordinary men and women who relinquished worldly power or never sought it at all, giving of themselves in service to others with no expectation of earthly reward. One of the titles for the Pope is The Servant of the Servants of God. 

Fourth, Marxism is collectivist. The evolutionary power dialectic is between groups or classes or categories. Thanks. Individuals are only participants in these categorical struggles. And so, Marxism is always trying to classify [00:19:00] individuals into groups, whether it be economic classes, races, genders, whatever. In reality, individuals are complex, and they don't always fit into groups, but in the Marxist mindset, we must be reduced to a category. Marxism is evolutionist and individuals are insignificant in evolutionary terms. No individual fish or frog or dinosaur ever mattered. What's important is the species and its struggle to liberate itself from being an oppressed amphibian to a glorious flying squirrel or whatever. In Marxism, you aren't a complex person. You're reduced to a member of whatever category the Marxist files you in. Black, white, rich, poor, whatever. You get the idea. Catholicism, on the other hand, sees the individual human person as an image of God with inherent dignity from [00:20:00] the moment of conception through natural death and then beyond. And because of that, Christ gave himself not for groups or classes, but for individual people. For you and for me. Through him, people of every race, tribe, language, and gender become equally children of God, and every category or barrier that fallen mankind or Marxists try to erect becomes insignificant. 

Fifth, Marxism is historically driven. Within Marxist doctrine, these struggles must play themselves out in this perpetual evolutionary, really revolutionary timeline towards some ill defined and hazy utopia, a historical salvation in which oppression will finally cease. But all of this is poorly defined and it's never actually reached. Catholicism is also [00:21:00] historically driven. But Catholicism sees history as having a very different origin. The creation and fall, driven by a different engine, God's plan of redemption, centered on a different turning point, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, and aimed toward a very different end, the return of Christ and the restoration of the creation to right relationship with God. Marxism's vision is small, it's confined to this world only. And as I said a moment ago, that drives their need for power in this life. 

Sixth, Marxism is scientific. But I put quotation marks around the word scientific. Marxism claims that its principles are not ideology or religion, but scientific truths which cannot be contradicted. However, They are discovered through the social sciences, which are [00:22:00] more valuable in Marxism than the physical sciences, because they give meaning to and direct the physical sciences in service of the revolutionary struggle. You can't argue with it. If you don't understand what they're saying or you object to it, it's because you're ignorant. And therefore, you're spreading false information, misinformation, disinformation about supposedly scientifically incontrovertible truths. However, only experts in these dubious social science fields can tell us the truth based on esoteric research, which cannot ever be questioned. Reason, morality, common sense, the lessons of past thinkers, none of these are relevant. And if they contradict the social sciences, they are disinformation and ignorance that must be suppressed. Catholicism, on the other hand, sees science and religion, faith and reason, not only as compatible, but like two wings of a bird [00:23:00] that must work together to fly. However, Catholicism has a much more developed sense of their roles and how they work together to discover and discern truth. 

Seventh, Marxism is elitist. In Marxism, these historical scientific truths can only be discerned, understood, and implemented by those properly educated to do so. They become the stewards, the custodians, of the revolutionary struggle on the part of the ignorant collective masses that can't grasp them. The rest of us need them to tell us what to believe, to organize us, to direct us. Without them, we would devolve into chaos and the oppressive boogeyman that are always lurking in the shadows would return to enslave us again. Now, we can't see the boogeyman or understand why we need these elites, but that only proves how blind and ignorant we really are.[00:24:00] These elites have the right educations, the right sensibilities, the right politics to guide our struggle. Catholicism, on the other hand, believes that each of us has inherent dignity, the gift of reason, and access to the truth. We have the holy scriptures, the teachings of the apostles, the legacy of the saints. And yes, we do have bishops and a pope to guard against error and shepherd the flock, but nothing that they do contradicts the truth that we all have access to. They merely unpack it and explain it and defend it. Here's a key difference.

Look at the lives of the saints. Not many of them were from an elite educated class. Most were ordinary men and women who loved God first and followed Christ and all of us can emulate their examples. 

And finally, Marxism is statist. It believes in the state. For all of the reasons above, politics is the [00:25:00] religion of the Marxist worldview. And therefore, government is its church. In an atheistic material universe driven by evolutionary struggle, government is the only arena that really matters because it's where power can be exerted. And the enlightened, properly educated elite can use that power to shape history according to the dictates of their social science experts. Now. Most sane people, Catholics included, recognize that government is necessary but in the smallest doses possible because politics isn't the center of life. Family, faith, meaningful work, caring for others. This is where life is actually lived for people with their heads screwed on straight. But the state is Marxism's church. Politics is their faith. Political struggle is their salvation. And government powers are their sacraments. Catholicism, on the other hand, offers [00:26:00] actual faith and actual churches and actual sacraments. Good Catholics should pay as much attention to the government as is necessary, and not a moment more, so that they can invest in things that will last for eternity.

So, there you have it. Eight fundamental characteristics of the Marxist worldview. Atheistic, conflict driven, power oriented, collectivist, indoctrinated by the social sciences, pursuing a secular salvation under the direction of a governing elite informed by the social sciences. Once you see the pattern, the algorithm of the Marxist worldview, you start recognizing it everywhere. It drives academia and the mainstream media. It's the narrative framework of almost every TV show and movie that you watch. It's how your kids are taught to see and make sense of the world. It's used to frame the debate on everything from [00:27:00] economics to the environment, race and gender, and on and on and on.

A lot of Americans were shocked over the last decade as something called woke or wokeness started popping up everywhere around them like weeds in their yard. It all seemed weird and they wondered where it all had come from. Well, they hadn't been paying attention because, well, because sane people have better things to do with their lives than pay attention to this stuff.

They wondered where this weird woke stuff came from and what it was all about. Well, mostly it's cultural Marxism, which is the application of the Marxist worldview to culture, social actions, and identity. Why is it called woke? Well, because in the Marxist worldview, you must become aware, awoken to the systemic structural oppression that is inherent in world history and the revolutionary struggle that is the ultimate purpose and goal of human [00:28:00] history. Those who are in the know are woke. Of course, Christians also believe in waking from spiritual slumber. But we awake to a very different reality. And that's the issue. Cultural Marxism and Christianity amount to two such fundamentally different views of reality that they essentially amount to being different religions. Cultural Marxism is based on the critical theory, which you hear so much about in the news. Critical theory is the historical scientific approach to power dynamics, which has been applied to everything from race to gender to sexuality and whatever. Maybe I'll do a future episode on it. But right now, I want to be entirely clear. There is a huge difference between having liberal views on questions of contemporary government policies or politics And progressive cultural Marxism as a quasi [00:29:00] religious worldview. I have friends and colleagues that are both liberal and conservative. And there's a reasonable range for disagreement on issues between people of goodwill.

But the Catholic Christian worldview and the Marxist worldview really can't be reconciled, despite a lot of people who try. Because, in Catholicism, the visible world is only a small part of a vast universe with a transcendent and supernatural reality over it, from which it comes forth and returns to. Because, in Catholicism, there is no dialectic power struggle. There is only truth, goodness, and beauty, which emanates from the person of the Trinity. As Dante put it, the love that moves the sun and other stars. There is no opposing truth. The only thing that prevents us from approaching union with Christ is our own individual sin and our poor moral choices which cause us to [00:30:00] turn away from the light. Because in Catholicism, people are not reduced to being members of classes or categories. We are all complex individuals with our own stories. What separates us is what we choose to love. As C. S. Lewis put it, in the end, there will only be two kinds of people, those who say to God, thy will be done, and those to whom God says, sadly, thy will be done. And because in Catholicism, we are not governed by elites with esoteric educations and bizarre politically driven social sciences. We have God's Word and the teaching of the Apostles, handed down in the treasury of faith through the Church. The greatest saints have often not been scholars or powerful leaders, but humble men and women who availed themselves of this treasury and gladly gave their lives [00:31:00] serving, not ruling, others. 

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