Why is Pope Francis Working with Communists?
*Author’s Note: This piece was originally published in RealClear Religion. (Photo: Associated Press)
Communism is antithetical to religion.
The hundreds of millions of graves around the world attest to that. The millions persecuted behind the Iron Curtain and falsely imprisoned — such as the Hungarian Cardinal József Mindszenty in the 1940s and, more recently, Catholic media tycoon Jimmy Lai by the Chinese government — are evidence to that as well.
The Soviet Union’s decades of religious suppression was displayed to the entire world when the Polish people cried, “We want God,” during Pope John Paul II’s 1979 apostolic trip to his homeland.
However, an ideology bent on liberating humanity from the “opium of the people” and conforming the populace into a unified groupthink is, at its core, opposed to the worship of God, and the inalienable rights gifted by Him. As Communist philosopher Karl Marx once proclaimed: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”
The path to true happiness, then, is found in humanity — and not in pursuing a relationship with a transcendent Creator. As Jesus Christ reveals “No one can serve two masters”; under communism, however, that master is the state. There is no room for God.
Yet proponents of this genocidal, anti-Christian philosophy were openly welcomed at the Vatican by Pope Francis as part of a “transversal dialogue project” on Jan. 10. Formed in 2014, the group, DIALOP, is composed of socialists, Marxists, communists and Christians, aiming to propose a “common social ethic that can be proposed as a new narrative for a Europe in search of its identity,” according to Vatican News.
In brief talks, the pontiff encouraged the group to envision a “better world”: one not embroiled by today’s “wars and polarizations,” or one that treats society’s vulnerable as castaways. He then referenced how Nazism “discarded the vulnerable and killed them.” The irony, however, is that Communist regimes killed more people than the Nazis in the 20th century. Perhaps the meeting and collaborating with open Marxists, socialists and communists is no surprise. Since elected, critics and commentators alike have wondered if the pope is a communist due to his “critique of free-market economics,” which he again criticized during the Jan. 10 audience.
Yet Pope Francis, in this respect, was aligned with Catholic Social Teaching in his speech: that every person is a child in the eyes of God, and worthy of dignity. While collaboration between groups to better humankind is laudable, the pope is aligning with people who subscribe to a philosophy that has wrought great evil in the 20th and 21st centuries. More importantly, he is not correcting those same people to recognize the turmoil its wreaked. His apologists could argue Christ worked with tax-collectors, and associated with prostitutes and other societal outcasts — but His message centered on their conversion and repentance. Both are fundamental to Christianity and acting upon the corporal works of mercy, which if adhered to, would establish the “common social ethic” that is being sought.
This spiritual battle between religiosity and communism has not been merely phenomenon of John Paul II’s pontificate. Since the mid-19th century, the Catholic Church has protested against the “pernicious fictions” of Marxism, socialism and communism, the earliest being Nostis et nobiscum in 1849. In Rerum Novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII was quite clear “that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal.”
Nearly half a century later, Pope Pius XI in Divini Redemptoris (1937), an encyclical on “atheistic communism,” viewed communism as a “threat” toward which the Church could “not remain silent.” He wrote:
“The Communism of today, more emphatically than similar movements in the past, conceals in itself a false messianic idea. A pseudo-ideal of justice, of equality and fraternity in labor impregnates all its doctrine and activity with a deceptive mysticism, which communicates a zealous and contagious enthusiasm to the multitudes entrapped by delusive promises. …Communism, moreover, strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse. There is no recognition of any right of the individual in his relations to the collectivity; no natural right is accorded to human personality, which is a mere cog-wheel in the Communist system.”
Then in 1949, Pope Pius XII approved a decree that excommunicated active Communists, and that the philosophy is an “irreconcilable enemy” of the Catholic Church. However, the decree’s effects were “widely ignored by priests in many countries,” since “many priests interpreted the decree as applying only to Communist party leaders, not to ordinary card-carrying members,” according to a 1973 New York Times report.
Nevertheless, John Paul II’s mission to tear down the Iron Curtain was the culmination of the Church’s combat against communism, not merely an outlier in the institution’s history. Even Catholic organizations, like the Knights of Columbus, spent a century fighting the philosophy by aiding refugees escaping communist countries, arming soldiers battling the Bolsheviks, organizing nationwide awareness tours, paying for Cardinal Mindszenty’s expenses while he lived in exile, and even facilitating formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Vatican in the early 1980s.
Which makes Pope Francis’s outreach to communists more troubling and confounding, especially in light of Fiducia Supplicans — a controversial decree that has opened the door to same-sex blessings. The Holy Father doesn’t appear to mind confusing the faithful by stretching Catholic doctrine to its limits; nor is there urgency on his part to curb the increasing polarization within the “universal Church,” as evident by the mixed response to the Vatican’s Synod on Synodality, the firing of a critical conservative bishop, and Fiducia’s approval (which sparked both praise from clerics like Father James Martin and immense pushback from bishops around the world, particularly in Africa). This Jan. 10 meeting, while not as inflammatory, certainly doesn’t help his optics in an age where it matters — perhaps more so than in any previous era.
Ultimately, the Lord hears the cry of the poor, and since we are “Christ’s body on earth” (as eloquently stated by St. Teresa of Avila), we have an obligation to tend to the vulnerable of society. But will Pope Francis hear the cries of the hundreds of millions killed by communism’s believers? Or will he affirm the philosophy’s anti-religious belief by misguidedly envisioning a “better world” with them?
If the latter, the pope will go against more than a century of Church teaching and, once again, harm the faithful’s trust in his leadership.
St. Joseph, patron of the Church, pray for us!