Communists are the Best Catholics?

Last week we heard that the Vatican had decided to allow the Communists to appoint bishops. This week, we get these statements:
“Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,” a senior Vatican official has said.

Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, praised the Communist state as “extraordinary”, saying: “You do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs”. Instead, there is a “positive national conscience”.

The bishop told the Spanish-language edition of Vatican Insider that in China “the economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States, something Americans themselves would say.”... [he] said that, as opposed to those who follow “liberal thought”, the Chinese are working for the greater good of the planet.
The Decree Against Communism is still in effect, but the drift in the direction of renouncing it seems pronounced of late.

11 comments:

Eric Blair said...

The Bishop is in error, and horribly so.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I read at First Things about two years ago the opinion that the current pope has a reflexive support for leftists trying to overthrow capitalist governments because he associates them with the earnest young men in coffeehouses he knew when he was young himself. They were idealists. They had the courage to stand up to some genuinely oppressive people. They seemed to genuinely care about the poor. There are two problems with this portrait. First, not all leftists are of this high standard. Second, they were wrong on many points anyway, overlooking and excusing the usually worse oppressors of the left.

That there are other bishops who have this starry-eyed view of the left and refusal to acknowledge the better results under even oppressive rightists is hardly surprising. I try to look at this pope as something of a corrective, yet I am running out of patience.

The other side is that I come from a rich nation. Perhaps I am making excuses for oppressors who benefited my tribe. It may be that I cannot be anything but blinded because of my personal privilege. But dammit, if they're so much more correct about what the gospel entails than I am, why can't they construct an argument that is at least hard for me to deal with? Yes, the Antichrist will also do wonders, so we should not regard the overwhelming superiority of the free market in feeding the poor as the final word, but really, shouldn't the reduction in misery for the poor be worth noting and explaining away, at minimum?

james said...

I perhaps have been laboring under a delusion that the church was supposed to apply the full prophetic challenge to states and to people (and to itself!), not just the currently popular bits. Be perfect, somebody said...

God knows there's plenty to find fault with in the West, but even using the restricted standard of "bad things the West does," China earns serious criticism. "No shantytowns?" "Positive national conscience?" Really?

jaed said...

If the "social doctrine of the Church" is best- or even well-implemented by totalitarians who do monstrous things, then there's something the matter with the social doctrine of the Church.

And I suspect I have some inkling what it is. Not just the romance of Communism, but the Latin American conviction that the lower classes should have a patron—their employer, or the State, or their landlord—who will take care of them, see that they behave properly, ensure their correct moral development. I don't think it's coincidental that the current Pope is Argentinian.

Korora said...

With his pronouncements, I have no clue what's genuine and what's the media breaking Prydianian harp strings.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Good reference Fflewdur

Gringo said...

AVI
I read at First Things about two years ago the opinion that the current pope has a reflexive support for leftists trying to overthrow capitalist governments because he associates them with the earnest young men in coffeehouses he knew when he was young himself. They were idealists. They had the courage to stand up to some genuinely oppressive people. They seemed to genuinely care about the poor. There are two problems with this portrait. First, not all leftists are of this high standard.

In 1972, V.S. Naipaul wrote a prescient article on Argentina in the New York Review, well before the Dirty War was in full swing: The Corpse at the Iron Gate. In 1972. Argentina had a military government. Perón was elected in 1973 and his widow was deposed in a coup in 1976. The Dirty War intensified after the coup. (Offhand, I would say that 98% of those killed in the Dirty War were killed from 1974-78 and maybe 90% from '75-'77)
From Naipaul in 1972:
These lawyers had been represented to me as a group working for “civil rights.” They were young, stylishly dressed, and they were meeting that morning to draft a petition against torture. The top-floor flat was scruffy and bare; visitors were scrutinized through the peep-hole; everybody whispered; and there was a lot of cigarette smoke. Intrigue, danger. But one of the lawyers was diverted by my invitation to lunch, and at lunch—he was a hearty and expensive eater—he made it clear that the torture they were protesting against wasn’t to be confused with the torture in Perón’s time.
He said: “When justice is the justice of the people men sometimes commit excesses. But in the final analysis the important thing is that justice should be done in the name of the people.” ……
“There are no internal enemies,” the trade union leader said, with a smile. But at the same time he thought that torture would continue in Argentina. “A world without torture is an ideal world.” And there was torture and torture. “Depende de quién sea torturado. It depends on who is tortured. An evildoer, that’s all right. But a man who’s trying to save the country—that’s something else.


The leftists that Naipaul interviewed had a very plastic attitude towards torture: "Depende de quién sea torturado. " (Tr.: It depends on who's being tortured.) According to those two leftists Naipaul interviewed, torture was good if our guys do it, bad if the police do it against us. Which doesn’t sound very different from the military gorilas’ point of view. Sounds to me as if a lot of the guerrillas and guerilla supporters were brothers under the skin to the right wing torturing military gorilas

The nervous breakdown that Argentina's political system endured in the 1970s was not at all confined to the military- there were lunatics on both sides. Argentina, like some other countries in Latin America, has long had the vivo as a cultural archetype. Literally translated as "lively," the vivo is an expedient type who has no problem with cutting corners. Con man would be an example. The businessman who cheats on the terms of the contract is another example. Torture, kidnapping, bank robbery, and killing were common currency in Argentine politics in the 1970s- which vivos on both sides saw as expedient solutions.

The Pope is either a knave or a fool. Having been schooled thoroughly in ethics, he is not a vivo.

Gringo said...

Naipaul's 1972 article also has a riveting portrait of a leftist priest, some of whom the current Pope must have known in his younger days.

The priest in charge was one of the “Priests for the Third World.” He wore a black leather jacket and his little concrete shed of a church, oversimple, rocked with some amplified Argentine song. It had been whispered to me that the priest came of a very good family; and perhaps the change of company had made him vain. He was of course a Peronist, and he said that all his Indians were Peronist. “Only an Argentine can understand Peronism. I can talk to you for five years about Peronism, but you will never understand.”

But couldn’t we try? He said Peronism wasn’t concerned with economic growth; they rejected the consumer society. But hadn’t he just been complaining about the unemployment in the interior, the result of government folly, that was sending two Indians into his shantytown for every one that left? He said he wasn’t going to waste his time talking to a norteamericano; some people were concerned only with GNP. And, leaving us, he bore down, all smiles, on some approaching Indians. The river wind was damp, the concrete shed unheated, and I wanted to leave. But the man with me was uneasy. He said we should at least wait and tell the father I wasn’t an American. We did so. And the father, abashed, explained that Peronism was really concerned with the development of the human spirit. Such a development had taken place in Cuba and China; in those countries they had turned their backs on the industrial society.


Not to coherent in the thinking department, was he?

In a return to Argentina two decades later, Naipaul met a former student of the leftist priest he interviewed in 1972. The priest's name was Father Mujica. Father Mujica later became a guerrilla, and was killed in a gunfight. The parents of a childhood friend were friends with Camilo Torres, a Colombian priest turned guerrilla fighter- who was also killed in battle. Like Father Mujica, Camilo Torres was from the aristocracy. Ernesto Cardenal, a Liberation Theology priest from Nicaragua, was also from the aristocracy. But Ernesto, never having taken up the gun, is still alive in his 90s.

Ymarsakar said...

The Vatican and by extension the Roman authorities, never had Apostolic authority. The entire system is a sham and deception.

Thus it is not that they are right or wrong, it is that they can never be right on gospel, doctrine, and teachings. They instead qualify under 2nd Peter 2 and so forth.

The world religion unified under the Vatican is becoming a little bit more clear. It has to be a State Totalitarian system, much like the previous Roman versions: that would be the best "Universal" system of dogma.

The Vatican is watching for and preparing for the advent of the Messiah. However, the question people don't like to ask is which messiah. They already have a doctrine ready and written for alien saviors as the new gods. Now that's what I call Roman Latin Preparation.

War of the Worlds dry run next up.

douglas said...

Gringo, remember that we were told that Bergoglio was an opponent of Liberation Theology (as in here)?

But I'm not sure that doesn't read more as an internecine battle of leftist theologies, and not between leftist theology and traditional.

Either way, this Pope has me greatly concerned. I have to wonder what my grandparents- Catholics who fled the communists in China- would think of all this.

Gringo said...

Gringo, remember that we were told that Bergoglio was an opponent of Liberation Theology
In addition, there were hints that during the Dirty War, he was not always the one making loud denunciations of the Junta's violations of human rights - and law, for that matter.

From what I have read, it appears that his reaction to the Chavista regime in Venezuela sounds rather similar to how he responded to the Junta from 1976-1983. The Pope has more or less said the equivalent of "Lets be nice and try to get along" regarding Venezuela, which is difficult to do when thugs are holding the seats of power, as they are doing in Venezuela- and as they did when the Junta ran things in Argentina.

But I'm not sure that doesn't read more as an internecine battle of leftist theologies, and not between leftist theology and traditional.
That sounds plausible.
As I am years away from Argentina, and not a Catholic, I am not as up on the issue as some.

I am reminded of my skimming Lucien Gregoire's Murder in the Vatican. I don't know how accurate Gregoire's account is,but it is interesting. He makes two rather interesting points. 1) That John Paul I, born Albino Luciani, was killed because he was a radical/Commie who was going to make big changes in the Church, such as give away all its wealth to the poor, and other changes. 2) Albino Luciani was from the beginning a Red plant in the church, who enrolled in seminary for that very reason. His mother was a devout Catholic. His father was an atheist and a revolutionary.

There is a passage in the book where in seminary in the 1920s, Albino Luciani has a roommate from the Soviet Union. He tells Luciani that in the Soviet Union, the government took care of homeless children. This was of course in contrast to cruel, capitalist Italy. This was also pure propaganda, as the Soviet Union had a rather substantial population of homeless children in the 1920s as a consequence of the Civil War and the Lenin-induced famine soon after.(Herbert Hoover to the rescue!) While there were some orphanages set up, they were so bad that most orphans left them as soon as they could.

Also interesting is that the former seminary student from the Soviet Union has an audience with John Paul I - or maybe it was the nephew or son of the Soviet seminary student. Hazy memory here.

I read enough of the book to conclude that while the author considered it a bad thing to kill the Pope for being a Red plant, not everyone would have a similar opinion.