Communism eliminates the most sacred gift that man received from God: freedom
Since communism (socialism) appeared in the world, as a practical expression of Marxism-Leninism, the Church fought relentlessly for its being atheistic, materialistic, inhuman, utopian, adverse to God and the Church. According to their mentors, Karl Marx, Lenin and others, “religion is the” opium of the people “, that is, the drug that leaves the alienated and subject people to holdings of capitalism and the rich. The empty accusation against the Church is to that she only taught the faithful to seek Heaven, abandoning the earth, and without fighting for social rights.
The many writings of the from the Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII (1878-1903) to the “Gospel of Joy” of Pope Francis, belie this lie. The Church has always been the institution in the history of humanity, which did more charity in the world.
To “liberate” the proletariat, communism preaches violent revolution, the “class struggle” the elimination of all classes, which is a utopia; urges the revolt of employees against employers, the poor against the rich; throws brothers against brothers, preaches the elimination of private property and chases against all kinds of religion, especially Christianity.
Above all, communism eliminates the most sacred gift that man received from God: freedom.See what is happening in Cuba today: citizens can not leave the country; it is a “prison island” in the XXI century, where people have not voted for over fifty years. And yet there are people that defend it.
Pierre Proudhon († 1865) said: “Communism degrades the natural gifts of man, puts mediocrity at the level of excellence and calls this equality.” In fact, it attempts to create a utopian equality that God never desired.
The Catholic faith teaches to help the poor in their material needs, but not by violence, not by shedding innocent blood or taking away the freedom and the precious human life and transforming the gear tooth state to a god. Morality does not accept that one does good by evil means; the ends can not justify the means. For the Communists all means are valid to deploy communism. It is a Machiavellian system that killed millions.
Winston Churchill († 1965) said: “A young man who was not a communist had no heart; but the adult who remains communist has no brain. “ M. Thatcher said that “socialism ends when you finishing spending other people’s money.”
It is important to meditate a little about what the Church has spoken about it. The document of Puebla (III CELAM, 1979) made it clear: “(…) The Christian liberation uses ‘evangelical circles’, with its peculiar efficacy, and does not use any kind of violence, or the dialectic of class struggle ( …) “(# 486) ‘or praxis or Marxist analysis” (8).
In the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, the “Divini Redemptoris, on the” “Atheistic Communism” (March 19, 1937), he strongly condemns it. Pius IX said, “And, drawing on the errors of communism and socialism, ensures that the ‘domestic society has its reason for being only in civil law’ (Quanta Cura, 5). Leo XIII asked, “labor hard that the children of the Catholic Church neither join nor favor in any way whatsoever this abominable sect “(Quod Apostolici Muneris, no.11).
“For, while the socialists would destroy the “right” of property, alleging it to be a human invention altogether opposed to the inborn equality of man, and, claiming a community of goods, argue that poverty should not be peaceably endured, and that the property and privileges of the rich may be rightly invaded, the Church, with much greater wisdom and good sense, recognizes the inequality among men, who are born with different powers of body and mind, inequality in actual possession, also, and holds that the right of property and of ownership, which springs from nature itself, must not be touched and stands inviolate. For she knows that stealing and robbery were forbidden in so special a manner by God “(Quod Apostolici Muneris – Encyclical against the socialist sects in #29)..
“For, indeed, although the socialists, stealing the very Gospel itself with a view to deceive more easily the unwary, have been accustomed to distort it so as to suit their own purposes, nevertheless so great is the difference between their depraved teachings and the most pure doctrine of Christ that none greater could exist” (Quod Apostolici Muneris, 5).
“The Church, preaching to men that they are all children of the same heavenly Father recognizes as a providential condition of human society the distinction of classes; therefore, teaches that only mutual respect of rights and duties, and mutual charity will be the secret of just balance, well-being honesty, true peace and prosperity of the people. (…) “Once again, we declare: the remedy for these evils will never be subversive equality of social orders” (Address of 24.1.1903 to the Patriarchate and the Roman Nobility).
“Human society, as God established it, is formed of unequal elements as are unequal members of the human body; making them all equal is impossible: that would be the very destruction of human society. “
“It follows that, according to the order established by God, there should be in society princes and vassals, employers and workers, rich and poor, wise and ignorant, nobles and commoners, all of whom, united by a common bond of love, help themselves and each other to achieve their ultimate end in the sky and their moral and material well-being on earth “(Quod Apostolici Muneris).
Pius XI said: “(…) As asked to our paternal solicitude we declare: socialism, whether it is considered as a doctrine or as historical fact or as ‘action’, if it is true socialism (…) can not be reconciled with Catholic doctrine as it conceives completely averse to true Christian way of society. “
“Religious socialism, Christian socialism are contradictory terms: no one can at the same time, be a good Catholic and a true socialist” (Quadragesimo Anno, No. 117-120).
Pius XII explained well the difference between people:
“Well, brothers are neither born nor remain all the same: some are strong, others weak; an intelligent, other incapable; one may be abnormal, and it can also happen that it becomes unworthy. A certain inequality is therefore inevitable material, intellectual, moral, in the same family (…) To claim the absolute equality of all would be to want identical functions to different members of the same body “(Address of 04.04.1953 the parishes of Catholics S. Marciano).
John XXIII, like other Popes, defended the need of private property: “As a further consequence of man’s nature, he has the right to the private ownership of property, including that of productive goods.” (Pacem in Terris, n ° 21.).
John Paul II, speaking against savage capitalism, said: “In this struggle against such a system, do not see, as an alternative model, the socialist system, which in fact is nothing but state capitalism, but a society of labor free, enterprise and participation “(no. 35)” The Church acknowledges the legitimate role of profit as an indicator of the proper functioning of the company “(no. 35). “Pope Leo foresaw the negative consequences — political, social and economic — of the social order proposed by “socialism”, which at that time was still only a social philosophy and not yet a fully structured movement. “(Enc. Centesimus Annus, n ° 12).
John Paul II also shows the grave mistake of socialism: “(…) we have to add that the fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. “(No. 13).
“In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII, with various arguments, insisted strongly against the socialism of his time in the natural character of private property rights. This right is fundamental to the autonomy and development of the person, has always been defended by the Church to this day “(No. 30).
The “Black Book of Communism – Crimes, Terror and Repression” (Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, Bertrand Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, 1999, 917 pp.) – It takes stock of the bitter fruit that this evil regime generated for humanity. Eighty years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917) and seven after the Soviet Union ended (1997), the tragic history of communism can be accounted for by the number of victims.
It is the story of the tragic real life application of a loaded ideology of false promises of equality and justice that cost between 80 and 100 million lives, the overwhelming majority of victims in the two giants of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union and China ; as well as Cuba, Viet Nan, Laos, Cambodia, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, etc.
In China, there were about 65 million deaths, most decimated by famine triggered from the “Great Leap Forward”, the disastrous self-sufficiency project implemented by Mao Zedong in the mid 50. This was the worst hunger history, accompanied by cannibalism waves and terror against peasants accused of hiding food campaigns.
In the USSR, from 1917 to 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, the purges, famine, mass deportations and forced labor in the Gulag killed 20 million people. The great famine of 1921-1922, unleashed largely by confiscation of food from peasants, claimed more than 5 million lives.
In North Korea, a card-carrying communist who still lingers, the execution of “enemies of the people” accounts for at least 100,000 dead. In proportional terms, however, the largest communist genocide is Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge: in three and a half years (1975-1979), with its merciless policy of forced relocation of residents of the cities to the countryside, it killed through starvation and exhaustion almost 25 % of the population. “
The crimes of Stalinism and the matrix of policy of terror employed by other communist regimes have become well known since the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956.
The organizer of the Book, Stéphane Courtois, is a former Maoist converted into a critic of Marxism; he argues that crime is intrinsic to communism not just a state instrument or Stalinist deviation of an ideology of humanitarian principles. Courtois also suggests the assimilation of communism to Nazism, based on the idea that both share the same logic of genocide. “The mechanisms of segregation and class totalitarianism and exclusion are very much like race totalitarianism,” writes Courtois.
Who still has the courage to defend such barbarism? However, it still exists in the minds of many academics, journalists and others who do not seem to know the lessons of history.
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