On 10 January 2024, Pope Francis received 15 members of DIALOP (Transversal Dialogue Project) in a private audience. The delegation included seven members of the Focolari Movement; a group of eight Marxists including Walter Baier, who has been president of the Party of the European Left since December 2022; and Cornelia Hildebrandt of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Baier and Hildebrandt have important CVs as far-left leaders. Baier was president of the Communist Party of Austria from 1994 to 2006, and between 2007 and 2022 he was the main coordinator of Transform Europe, a radical left collective. Cornelia Hildebrandt is a writer and thinker from the same political field who, through the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, has tried to stimulate dialogue between Marxists and Christians. The Focolari movement itself is a lay Catholic movement founded in 1943 by Silvia Clara Lubich in Trento, Italy. Silvia Lubich was a great devotee of the Franciscan St. Clare of Assisi. At the meeting, the Pope called for dialogue between Christians and Marxists in order to work for the “common good.”
This meeting had a negative impact on conservative and even moderate Catholic circles, reinforcing speculation about the Pope’s ‘leftism,’ leading to positions of resentment and frustration, and even less orthodox comments. Since this is a sensitive topic, like all those that are on the edge of competing loyalties, and which involve Heaven and Earth, it should be approached with prudence, provided that such prudence is not at the expense of clarity and truth.
First of all, it should be remembered that papal infallibility is only exercised for Catholics when the Holy Father speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith, morals, and customs, because it is in these conditions that he has the supernatural assistance of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the subject of Pope Francis’ meeting with the Focolari laity and the Marxists of the European Left does not oblige or disoblige Catholics from the point of view of any hierarchical obedience.
But the important issue that can and must be discussed, freely and truthfully, is the relationship between Christianity and Marxism. It is necessary to go beyond the surface—of the rhetoric of purposes—deeper into the philosophy and nature of things. Nor should it be forgotten that, since Marxist regimes have been in place in parts of Europe and the world for several decades, it is possible to see how these regimes have treated and are treating Christians. Such things are sometimes forgotten in the enthusiasm that comes from the bringing together of opposites.
Alasdair Macintyre is a contemporary English thinker who, in equating Christianity and Marxism, had no doubt in seeing multiple influences from the former in the latter. For Macintyre, the philosopher of Capital had carried out a kind of secularisation of Christian values, mediated by Hegel’s dialectics and Feuerbach’s materialism.
Looking at the history of thought and the history of revolutions in the West, there is no doubt that Christian utopianism, memorably depicted in Utopia by Thomas More at the beginning of the 16th century, but present even earlier in the millenarian tradition—from The Apocalypse of St. John to Campanella’s City of the Sun to Milton’s Paradise Lost—has its roots in the myths of a lost Golden Age to be found again at the end of time, and in many other aspects of the egalitarian future of utopian socialists. Norman Cohn has developed this theme exemplarily in The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Nor is it difficult to find parallels between the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount—with its exaltation of poverty and detachment from material goods—and the anti-capitalist radicalism found in revolutionary socialist rhetoric. Neither is it difficult to find ethical parallels, both in ideals and in proclaimed enemies, between the theology of Christian millenarianism and Marxist political-ideological rhetoric.
But these are the similarities on the surface from a simplified existential perspective—common values to combat inequality, values of solidarity, and community. At the bottom of things, there are differences, and quite profound ones at that. The most essential is the fact that Marxism is a radical materialist scientism that denies any spirituality or transcendence: it asserts that material reality, as perceived by the senses, is the only real and true reality.
Marx (1818-1883) was a disciple of the radical materialist wing of the Enlightenment and of his contemporary and compatriot Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), whose anti-religious principles served as the foundation for his anthropology, particularly his view of the Christian religion. For Feuerbach, religion was nothing more than a product of the imagination and sentiment, a “subjectivity without limits,” contrary to reason and the nature of things. Thus, God would be nothing more than a product and projection of the imagination of man who, alone in the world, would replicate and invent an imagined and imaginary transcendent reality. Like all materialist philosophers, Feuerbach’s and Marx’s epistemology is based exclusively on sensory perception.
Feuerbach and Marx also insisted on the role of the Christian religion as a servant of the established powers; this is how it would have been throughout the ages, whether by sustaining the Ancien Régime as a reproduction of God’s will on earth, or by promising a future life to the poor and disinherited of this world—an illusory and demobilising compensation for the masses.
Marx’s philosophy is thus based on values and knowledge of the world and of man that are diametrically opposed to any transcendent religion. In fact, the Church was keen to clarify this contradiction from the outset, highlighting that the Marxist critique of industrial society, and the Christian critique of the social injustices that it generated, could lead to confusion. The doctrine of the social popes was no different, from Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum and his successors right up to John Paul II, who in Centesimus Annus took care to confirm and renew the teachings, warnings, and condemnations of his predecessors. Having lived in communist Poland, St. John Paul II knew what he was talking about.
This leads to the second important aspect that Catholics and all Christians must bear in mind when dealing with Marxists and Communists. The fact is that the regimes inspired by Marxism-Leninism, when in power, banned and persecuted religion and religious people. Everywhere since the Soviet Revolution (Lenin explicitly ordered a commitment against “all forms of idealism and religion”), ‘militant atheism’ has been taken over by communist regimes, since “atheism was the philosophy that was in accordance with scientific truth.”
Although for tactical and pragmatic reasons the ban on religion was not written into Soviet constitutions, it was common practice. During the revolution, the 1920s, and Stalinism, persecution was the rule and the Orthodox Church paid a high tribute of martyrs to the faith in Christ. In Spain and Mexico, too, the Communists persecuted Catholics, closed churches, and murdered bishops, priests, and religious. Millions of Christians were killed by the communists in the 20th century. In other words, whenever they had power, political or otherwise, the Marxists persecuted Christians. They killed Christians—from Spain to China, in the USSR, in Asia, and in Africa—in huge numbers. Only, thanks to subtle propaganda, they have managed to forget and to reappear with the same ideas in a state of apparently unsullied ideology.
Pope Francis can and must promote the cooperation and collaboration of all people of good will, Christians and non-Christians alike, in the search for the “common good.” But it is important, with regard to Marxists and other radicals on the Left (just as on the Right it will be necessary to beware of pagan and racist drifts), to know how to distinguish and prevent confusions and syncretisms that could mislead Christians of good faith into ambiguous associations. In such associations, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find common ends, let alone the “common good.”
