A Comment on 'What the Popes Have to Say About Socialism'

Below is a comment left on Facebook by Peter Hansen on the essay I posted here.

Modern Catholic political theory is a shambles. The earliest condemnations of socialism followed on the heels of the revolutions of 1848 which roiled Europe. This was also the year in which Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto. Within a year, the pope would condemn it, correctly seeing in its principles a philosophy that is completely at odds with Christianity.

Traditionalists tend to think of the 19th century as a halcyon time because one recalls Catholic emancipation, Lourdes, St. Catherine Laboure, La Salette, and in the USA, the period when the Church began to establish herself on a permanent, non-missionary footing. The reality is somewhat more troubled, because the era also witnessed the aggressively anti clerical actions of the Austrian empire, the violent attack upon the Church's territorial possessions during the Italian wars of unification, and continuous dispossessions throughout Spanish America.

Throughout the 19th century, vast swaths of the globe saw the repudiation of the Catholic political theory of Christendom. As internal migration led the peasantry to take up urban, industrial occupations, the Church met the challenge of adapting its message to a new social landscape. The popes, though willing to support workers' aspirations for material well being, understood the basic incompatibility with a political system that denies the right of the Church to restrict the scope of Christian economic activity. We're still struggling with this problem, although now in the post industrial phase.

In the Catholic view, the purpose of government is to protect the people. Apart from that, it has no moral authority at all unless it receives it from the Church. The Church only gives this authority in return for the state's promise to defend it. All modern governments reject this bargain, and they have proved it by the murderous wars that they have waged against other Christians for the past century. Modern governments also reject the principle of private property - and insist that property must serve the purpose that the state dictates. Without property, the commandments against theft and covetousness have no meaning. Pope John Paul II tried to create an alliance with liberal democracy - the result is universal abortion, a complete legal rejection of Christian domestic and sexual morality, and the total exclusion of catechesis from the state schools.

Now, Pope Francis searches for a marriage of convenience with socialism based on cooperative effort on behalf of the poor. It won't work because compromise on those terms admits, however hard they try to hide it, that the things of true importance are material and not spiritual. The spectacle of a pope cozying up to socialists (or, one could add, professional athletes) is as pathetic as the gambler who uses his last dollar to buy a lottery ticket.