Pope, Communists Outline 'Joint Mission'--'A Radical Civilizational Transformation'

In what seems stranger than fiction, down the next rabbit hole we go…

…and, first things first, shout-out to reader (J.B.) who alerted me to the below piece; as always, translations, emphases, and commentary mine.

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Pope: Marxists and Christians have a Common Mission

Via KNA [Catholic News Agency], 10 Jan. 2024 [source]

Caption': ‘Pope Francis desires ‘courage to think outside the box’ and favours the dialogue for “new ways”. Christians, Socialists, Marxists, and Communists have a joint mission’.

Pope Francis has encouraged the Marxist-Christian dialogue group ‘Dialop’ to work together for the disadvantaged and against corruption and abuse of power [I suppose it takes one to know one]. Christians, as well as socialists, Marxists, and communists, should build a ‘better, fraternal future’ for a world divided by wars and polarisation, Francis said at a reception at the Vatican on Wednesday [10 Jan. 2024]. It is important to overcome rigid divisive approaches, to conduct discussions with an open heart, and to listen to one another without excluding anyone for political, social, or religious reasons.

‘Don’t let finance and the market dictate the law’, the Pope told his guests. They should ‘not stop dreaming of a better world’ in which ideals such as freedom, equality, dignity, and fraternity are upheld; these ideals are a ‘mirror of God’s dream’ for humanity. [oh my, who needs enemies with such ‘friends’? Note, as an aside, the papal reverence for Hegelian-Marxian ‘speculative’ (via the mirror) reasoning]

The Pope wanted ‘courage to step outside the box’ and an opening in dialogue for ‘new paths’. It is important to devote full attention to the weak; the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, the migrants, the exploited and all those who would be excluded by a throwaway culture. Dealing with them is the measure of a civilisation. The great dictatorships such as National Socialism discarded and even killed precisely these groups, recalled Francis. [this is such an inane, misleading, and, above all, disingenuous comment, it boggles my mind]

Service to the People

In order to achieve solidarity and justice, systems of inequality must be purified in their intentions, ‘including through radical changes of perspective in the distribution of challenges and resources between people and peoples’, demanded Pope Francis [let’s not mince words here, what the pope is calling for is redistribution of resources, for which there there is a short-hand term: communism; here’s what Jesus said, according to Matthew 26:11: ‘The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have Me’]. It is important to put one's creativity at the service of a more humane society.

The dialogue platform ‘Dialop’ is dedicated to dialogue between Christians and socialists or Marxists. Together with educational institutions [uh-oh], the members [of ‘Dialop’] work on social ethics and ecology, combining Marxist ideas and Catholic social teaching [the latter doesn’t need the former]. The initial spark for this was a meeting between Pope Francis and the later Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in 2014.

At the audience, the platform presented the Pope with its activities over the past ten years, some of which were supported by the Vatican's cultural and educational authority. It was a ‘beautiful program’, praised Francis. Among the 15 participants were Luisa Sello from the Focolare Movement in Vienna and Cornelia Hildebrandt, who lives in Berlin and is also co-president of the ‘transform!europe’ network.

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WTF is the Pope, of all people, doing?

I don’t know. We did know that, although (technically) a Jesuit, Pope Francis came out of Latin America where he was dealing with the consequences of what is commonly called ‘Liberation Theology’ on a daily basis. We may thus infer that he’s not a stranger to communist hogwash (which I refuse to call ‘ideas’).

Moreover, there is not a lot, if anything, the Catholic Church ‘needs’ in terms of ideas or resources that requires partnering with communists, of all (para)ideological dispositions. Another news item, this one from the Vatican, has ‘more’ quotes but essentially tells the same story as the one above.

At this point, we’ve gotten a few names and institutions, hence let’s check them out, shall we?

WTF is ‘Dialop’?

Courtesy of their ‘About’ section, we may thus learn:

DIALOP transversal Dialogue Project. DIALOP fosters and supports the dialogue of good willing persons, with secular and religious backgrounds, especially between Socialist/Marxists and Christians. In collaboration with universities and other formal or informal educational institutions, DIALOP aims to develop and implement the fields of a Social Ethics, applying the principles of the Marxian Social Critique and the Social Doctrine of the Church. This project is called RESET.

You didn’t expect that, did you?

The History of DIALOP

During the private audience that Pope Francis granted to two left politicians Alexis Tsipras and Walter Baier as well as Franz Kronreif of the Focolare Movement on September 18th 2014, the conversation focused on the environmental crisis and the worldwide social crisis. At the end of that audience Pope Francis called the visitors to launch a transversal dialogue, capable of involving the broadest strata of society and above all of the youth. He said: ‘No world power today is able to solve the crucial problems of the world alone.’ And Tsipras added: ‘We agreed on the need to continue the dialogue between the European left and the Christian church’, he said. ‘There is a need to create an ecumenical alliance against poverty, inequalities, against the logic that markets and profits are above people.’ [an ‘ecumenical alliance’ between Marxism and the Church? Sure, why not, for all I care about, the former is a kind of religious creed]

From that first meeting many more followed between intellectuals, scholars and students of the Christian and of the Left side.

Finally, here’s what ‘Dialop’ says about its ‘RESET’:

The RESET project aims to advance the creation of new, attractive and sustainable European narratives by elaborating an academic curriculum of transversal social ethics to be tested by the partnering universities and then offered to other educational institutions.

Three different approaches—Christian social teaching, Marxian critical theory and feminisms—try to achieve a differentiated consensus.

*shudder*

Who Finances ‘Dialop’?

I’ve yet to find out clear-cut financial information, so I cannot inform you about the financial backers of ‘Dialop’. There’s a bunch of ‘collaborators’ listed, incl. the communist Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, some universities and colleges, and the like, but financial statement.

In a report by the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano newspaper, we do read the following:

‘It was a long journey made above all by Christians linked to the Focolare movement, but not only, and groups of Greek, Austrian, German, and Italian communists. Meetings were held in which, with maximum freedom and mutual respect, we tried to address together issues of social ethics that seemed to be a common ground of understanding. It is a journey, which continues; today's meeting is not a point of arrival’ states the journalist Michele Zanzucchi, professor from the Sophia University Institute, one of the promoters of Dialop. Among the main results of the initiative, the Summer School which took place in September 2018 on the Greek island of Syros, hosted by the University of the Aegean , supported by the Sophia University Institute, and subsidised by the Greek Parliament. Over fifty professors, students and activists took up the invitation expressed under the title ‘Europe as a common: let's think about it!’. ‘The main thing is the dialogue itself’—says Zanzucchi—’that is, the fact of being able to dialogue and deeply respect each other's beliefs. It is not a dialogue between believers and non-believers. Everyone believes in something. It is a dialogue between people with different beliefs.’

It’s not just me who claims that communism is a kid of faith-based group; they say so themselves.

About that summer school, well, here’s a write-up (in Italian) by Città Nuova.

What Does this Mean?

‘Dialop’ has published a position paper (also available in German and Italian; here’s their short version in Italian). This certainly deserves much more attention, but for the moment, I shall cite and comment only on a few snippets:

A new ‘enemy’: a single dominant cultural model, globalisation, which makes us neighbours, but not brothers…

The pope affirms that it is now urgent not to remain prisoners of two attitudes that seem to dramatically dominate the contemporary world: first, the ideology that sustains that of the actual order of the world is the only one possible; and second, that soft reformism (with its superficial adjustments) will not be capable of weakening the strongest systemic injustices on the altar of which we sacrifice the future of the next generations.

It is hard to imagine how even after the fall of the Wall, a critical tradition as Socialism, would disagree with the idea that this economy is an economy that excludes. It is an economy that promotes the idolatry of money, allowing the world of finance [sic] govern our planet rather than serve it, permitting so many situations of injustice that generate violence against people and our natural environment…

The human and natural environment are deteriorating side-by-side; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to the roots of human and social degradation [nobody is safe, until everyone is safe]. In fact, the deterioration of the environment and of society affects the most vulnerable people on the planet…

Surprising affinities in the present

In the Catholic Church as in the socialist-oriented movements, the perception has grown stronger that the goals of both can only be realized if a radical civilizational transformation is carried out. There can and must be no ‘business as usual’. [whatever happened to ‘Render unto Caesar…’? It seems that the pope has transmogrified the Catholic Church into a kind of de facto communist-revolutionary vanguard]

Pope Francis' message ‘This economy kills’ unites us. It also unites us in the knowledge that it is the economic, political, cultural and international relations that generate unholy destructive tendencies. We want to end the barbarism of destruction of nature, hunger, disease and war, of constantly building new walls and camps, of obscene luxury and monstrous concentration of property, power and wealth [i.e., ‘we want redistribution’]. Together, we are committed to policies that unite many in solidarity.

The socialists among us call it class-binding solidary center-bottom alliance politics. In the last decennia there appears a kind of common ground between the two traditions with the special option for the poor and the thinking about the special active role of the poor—and the popular movements—in our societies and the world. The underlying principle could be formulated as follows: no one can be truly free unless the most disadvantaged among us are free.

This is also the notion that informed National Socialist and other Fascism movements, by the way: ‘the commonweal’ (Gemeinwohl) trumps ‘individual matters’ (Eigenwohl).

If you’d interject here, calling out: wait a moment, I’ve heard this before quite recently, I’ll answer: yep, we all did, during the WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’.

It aims to attain the break with all killing conditions, and instead calls for the creation of an economy, society and culture of free living in solidarity. It is the difficult path of nonviolent resistance, which includes persistent civil disobedience. We recognize the differences between the power and violence of those defending their own privileges and the structures of exploitation of men and nature and those uprising against these structures.

This is all bad, no doubt about it, but if you thought it couldn’t get worse, well, the ‘position paper’ continues.

Refoundations on both sides

The capitalism of the first industrial revolution is no longer the neoliberal one of today, but also the two distinct traditions, the Church - the Churches - and the Left are no longer what they used to be…

Karl Marx had summarized the ideas of socialism with four thoughts. First, the “categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence” (MECW 2: 182 [Marx did so citing Goethe’s Faust, specifically Mephistopheles, servant of Satan, jus’ sayin’]) and to create associations “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (MECW 6: 506).

Secondly, through a social revolution or transformation, the capitalist mode of production must be overcome, in the wake of which “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature.“ (MECW 37: 807) [which is what, apparently, Pope Francis signed the Catholic Church up for]

On this basis, it would be necessary, thirdly, to gradually create the conditions for abolishing “the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour”, to organize work and activities in such a way that they become “life's prime want” and finally “with the all-round development of the individual, […] all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly” and “the society inscribes on its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to her and his needs!” (MECW 24: 87) [which has never worked in reality, but, hey, what’s some 100m dead between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, according to R.J. Rummel’s Death by Government?; I’m sure if we’ll simply ‘do it the right way’ this time, results will be different, eh?]

Fourthly, Marx made it clear with all firmness: “Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.” (MECW 37: 763) [remember: ‘you will own nothing, and you’ll be happy’]

It is obvious that no sane person, let alone someone in power, would sign up to this crap:

What could make Christianity lose its reputation of always being the defender of the status quo, the existing order, to be the privileged ally of conservative political regimes, to be the main furnishers of the legitimating rhetoric of the order in society against change, whether revolutionary or reformatory…

Secularization and the gradually ending of the preferential conservative alliances of the Church with obsolete political systems have given the Catholic world an innovative look at the social problems of society more in line with the evangelical ideals [sic], and a practice [remember, this is what commies mean by that term] more in line with the preferential option for the poor—fostering a growing general attitude that favours at all costs a culture of encounter, one of dialogue, because no one has the whole truth on their side [is this sill projection?]…

What has changed?

Today, God no longer seems an obstacle to the Left for collaboration with official Christian forces, and reaching the homeland of fraternity is no longer only an unearthly dream for Christians…

The God that socialism rejected when it adopted an atheist and violent approach to life and society so to speak, was that really the God of Jesus Christ? [how do you spell ‘blasphemy’ in commie-speak?]

Theology today states this not to be so. A chief God, at the top of a social and political pyramid, is clearly the opposite of the image of the Father, Abba, which Jesus proclaims [that’s how to do it]. He is not the impenetrable Mystery: He is the Father who is the source of the freedom of the Son and of all his children and as He is the source of fraternity among all, this means that the real frame of reference for Christians implies freedom, justice and sharing. The item of violence too as a way to revolutionary reform is handled differently nowadays, on both sides the value of active non-violence in the political realm is becoming a common point of interest. Socialism in Europe has long opted for the way of change by democratic means [good one, perhaps because a violent overthrown will be resisted by, you know, the 99%?].

These developments remove any doubt about the idea that the Church has to be on the side of the status quo, of the preservation of unjust social and political structures. Jesus had already removed all ambiguity in this regard: the face of the Sacred and of God can no longer be exploited to guarantee any status quo that is not fraternal, just, free or in solidarity [now, I’m not an expert in this, but I don’t recall these issues are the Gospel Truth]. Nevertheless it is clear that this understanding today is the result of an evolution in many stages and is manifesting only now its full force [the other way to label this is Dialectics]…

This is of course not the whole story. Any organized religion seems to show a dialectic [told ya] between closeness and openness, between institution and prophets. In history, the defence of existing religious institutions was regularly broken up by dynamic openness, forged by special gifted persons, bearers of charisms, changing perspectives, proposing new insights, liberating new social forces, creating a bottom-up dynamism, and interesting elements of reform. Some of them influenced the whole Christian world as Benedict from Norcia, or Francis of Assisi. Not infrequently the protest aspect of each charismatic, prophetic, figure and the movements they animated encountered enough openness from the institutional (Catholic) Church, sometimes they were only received centuries later, and only after dramatic schisms.

Clearly, seen from where we stand now, Socialism as a broad historical current helped the Christian world to make the final leap from a dynamic ethics for each person – with growing social impact in the long run – to an ever more effective ethics for the social world that build relations between social classes, peoples, cultures, politics at any level and international relations.

The rise of modernity, on the other hand, ended up radically transforming the structures of traditional societies, and after a few centuries it also tended to marginalize or denigrate the role of Jesus Christ and his relationship to God, as a generator of consistency and innovative capacity in history. On the other hand, the innovative energies that have their roots, even partially, in the evangelical inspiration did not cease to work from within our societies. Regardless, modern culture [antithesis] and evangelical inspiration [thesis] were still unable for long decennia to create synergy [synthesis; told ya, it’s Dialectics].

A few more paragraphs, then we’re done here. Sigh.

What in a nutshell could summarize the evolution of Christian ethics from the individual person towards an ethic that regards the basic social structures of society, a social ethic in the plain sense, spanning a journey of twenty centuries? In The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, the most authoritative compilation text on the subject of the Catholic Church, (52) says: “God, in Christ, redeems not only the individual person but also the social relations existing between men“. Probably the most important comment on this quote comes from pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti (186) defining the notion of ‘social‘ and ‘political love‘…

Today there is an increasingly consolidated practice and convictions, which can be translated into the idea that one should not wait to agree on everything to start a dialogue. As often repeated by pope Francis, what is important is to start a process. None has a monopoly of the truth [which is to say that the Roman Church is in the process of ending itself]. In the process of building mutual attention, fraternity, taking responsibility together for the future of the planet, one is certain to discover elements of a transformative transversal ethic.

And what finally about changing capitalism?

As said synthetically [told ya] by one of the most prominent Christian economists, S. Zamagni, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences: «I don’t believe in the possibility to break down capitalism as the revolutionary tradition suggests. I believe in the possibility to transform from within launching processes capable to change its way of developing».

In the socialist current, the concept of a double socio-ecological transformation in capitalism beyond capitalism, overcoming in a process of radical reforms, based on alliances of different classes and strata, bottom-up and by government, closely linking local, national and global struggles in a solidarity based way was developed.

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Bottom Lines

That was hard, I’m glad it’s done. On a more serious level, this is as absurd as it gets. The Pope apparently signed off on the ending of Catholicism, which will merely hasten the demise of the Roman Church as it existed since Vatican II.

In the US and elsewhere, ‘traditional Catholics’ and other groups within the Roman Church that refuse Vatican II and the increasingly woke-fied positions of the Papal Curia, are gaining traction.

Will this lead to a new schism? I don’t know, but I will say this: it is likely that the current Pope, whose health is failing and whose days are numbered, is working overtime to ensure this legacy of his—the Trojan Horse of Communism—will remain after his death.

Keep in mind that this is all part and parcel of the long-standing aims of Communism to ‘march through the institutions’, so to say; as Antonio Gramsci, the Italian propagator of Cultural Marxism wrote over a century ago:

Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity.

These chicken have, apparently, come home to roost.

What does this all mean?

Here, I’ll let Nina Horaczek, a (cult) member of the ‘Dialop’ group, explain it to you in all clarity; the below lines were written as a press release on 9 Nov. 2022, a day after a high-level meeting between communists and clergy in the European Parliament.

Representatives of the Holy See who spoke there included Manuel Enrique Prieto, Secretary General of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community, and Piero Coda, Secretary General of the International Theological Commission, who was appointed by Pope Francis in 2021 as one of seven advisors to the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [i.e., these aren’t individuals without influence]. Europe's radical left parties were represented by Marisa Matias, deputy leader of the Left in the EU Parliament, José Manuel Pureza, vice president of the Portuguese Parliament, and former KPÖ leader Walter Baier from Austria.

In a joint position paper, the church and the left found clear words…

It is true that there are always sympathies and points of contact with left-wing positions in the ranks of the Catholic clergy. But this happened far away from the centers of Vatican power, for example among the liberation theologians in Latin America, who were often reprimanded for exactly this from the highest authorities. It is all the more remarkable that the Holy See and the radical left are officially putting aside their long-held and deep differences…

How did the Pope find communism? In September 2014, Francis invited Alexis Tsipras, head of the left-wing Syriza party in Greece, to a private audience together with Baier, then coordinator of Transform, the European Left think tank. This conversation developed into a years-long dialogue between the Catholic world and the European left about ecological crises and social injustice in the world.

Church and Left, how does that fit together? ‘We are well aware that these are two worlds that have largely been enemies on the public stage [and on the ‘private’ stage?] for the last two hundred years and that are still quite far apart on certain issues’, admit the authors of the position paper. ‘But with the survival of humanity and the future of the Earth at stake, genuine dialogue and collective action with all people of goodwill is now more urgent than ever.’

You see, There Is No Alternative™.

Resistance is Futile. You Will be Assimilated by the Borg Commies.

I suppose that, at this point in time, it is pretty much irrelevant if you are a Christian or not; at this late stage, there’s but one question left:

What is your hill?