Liberation Theology, Cardinal Ratzinger, and Orwell

The greatest ideological disease afflicting us today is the determination to do "anything in the name of" a particular cause, a disease which was weaponized by Communism and injected into the Church by the first wave of liberation theology. Here, Cardinal Ratzinger discusses what it looked like when injected:

...At almost a moment’s notice, there was a change in the ideological ‘paradigm’ by which the students and a part of the teachers thought. While until now Bultmann’s theology and Heidegger’s philosophy had determined the frame of reference for thinking, almost overnight the existential model collapsed and was replaced by the Marxist. Ernst Bloch was now teaching in Tübingen and made Heidegger contemptible for being petty bourgeois…Existentialism fell apart, and the Marxist revolution kindled the whole university with its fervor, shaking it to its very foundations. A few yeas before, one could still have expected the theological faculties to represent a bulwark against the Marxist temptation. Now the opposite was the case: they became its real ideological center....

...the destruction of theology that was now occurring (through its politicization as conceived by Marxist messianism) was incomparably more radical precisely because it took biblical hope as its basis but inverted it by keeping the religious ardor but eliminating God and replacing him with the political activity of man.  Hope remains, but the party takes the place of God, and along with the party, a totalitarianism that practices an atheistic sort of adoration ready to sacrifice all humanness to its false god.  I myself have seen the frightful face of this atheistic piety unveiled, its psychological terror, the abandon with which every moral consideration could be thrown overboard as a bourgeois residue when the ideological goal was at stake.  All of this is alarming enough in itself; but it becomes an unrelenting challenge to the theologian when the ideology is presented in the name of the faith and the Church is used as its instrument.  The blasphemous manner in which the Cross now came to be despised as a sign of sadomasochism, the hypocrisy with which some still passed themselves off as believers when this was useful, in order not to jeopardize the instruments that were to serve their own private ends: all of this could and should not be made to look harmless or regarded as just another academic quarrel....

It was actually a small circle of functionaries who drove developments in the direction of I have described.  But it was this circle who determined the reigning climate...--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977 (Ignatius Press, 1998), p.136-138.

The process which then-Cardinal Ratzinger describes above is discussed in greater detail by me here and here. More from the Cardinal and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith here.  Cardinal Stafford describes the eruptions of 1968 here.  The dynamic at work is the normal union of ideology and reason in the pursuit of political aims/power, which is an inversion of the Church's union of faith and reason in pursuit of truth and love.  The end result of the premises which underly liberation theology come out clearly in the dedication of Rules for Radicals:

Make no mistake--the weaponized disease of "anything in the name of" afflicts the right just as badly as the left, as the Global War on Terror continues to prove. But give credit where credit is due--the left managed to modernize it and disseminate it to the world.

The Marxist Face of Saul Alinsky

Wow. Really?

Like Machiavelli, whom he has studied and admires, Alinsky teaches how power may be used. Unlike Machiavelli, his pupil is not the prince but the people... In his view, the end of achieving power justifies a wide range of means. "To get anywhere," Alinsky teaches, "you've got to know how to communicate. With city hall, the language is votes, just as with a corporation it's stock power. This means that they never hear with their ears but only through their rears." He knows how to kick. To force slumlords, corporations or city officials to clean up buildings, provide jobs or stop cheating consumers, he resorts to picketing, boycotts, rent strikes and some imaginative dramatic stunts. He had garbage dumped on an alderman's driveway to make the point that collections were inadequate in the slums; ghetto rats were ceremoniously deposited on the steps of city hall. If the occasion requires, Alinsky's forces will not refrain from spreading rumors about an antagonist or indulging in something that comes very close to blackmail. "Our organizers," he says, "look for the wrong reasons to get the right things done." He has only contempt for liberals who appeal to the altruism of their opponents: "A liberal is the kind of guy who walks out of a room when the argument turns into a fight... Alinsky deliberately cultivates his split personality; he believes that a well-developed case of schizophrenia is essential to successful radicalism. The radical knows in his heart that life is tragic, men are complex, and every course of action involves a choice of evils. Nevertheless, he must act as if he were utterly convinced of the righteousness of his cause. Only by so doing can he rally his supporters and intimidate the opposition... When he is not performing, however, Alinsky hardly fits the radical stereotype...Alinsky deliberately cultivates his split personality; he believes that a well-developed case of schizophrenia is essential to successful radicalism. The radical knows in his heart that life is tragic, men are complex, and every course of action involves a choice of evils. Nevertheless, he must act as if he were utterly convinced of the righteousness of his cause. Only by so doing can he rally his supporters and intimidate the opposition... After graduation, he received his first lesson in the realities of power when, as a graduate fellow in criminology, he studied Al Capone's gang. He learned that in the Chicago of the 1930s, crime was the Establishment. "When one of those guys got knocked off, there wasn't any court. Most of the judges were at the funeral, and some were pallbearers." ...Alinsky wonders how white liberals can believe in the dignity of all races when they are so willing to surrender their own by submitting to outrageous attacks from blacks. "During the trial of Black Pan ther Leader Huey Newton, many liberals wore buttons reading 'Honkies for Huey!' " he notes. "Can you imagine, if a white civil-rights leader were on trial, that blacks would go about with buttons reading 'Niggers for so-and-so'?" ...Alinsky is equally impatient with white student radicals because of their innocence about power. "You never take an action," he says, "without first figuring out the reaction. Periodic mass euphoria around a charismatic leader is not an organization." He feels that Utopian militants are just as much dropouts from society as hippies, because both "dogmatically refuse to begin with the world as it is." He has little faith in the staying power of some of the more belligerent radicals; often they are the first to give up when the going gets rough. "He who lives by the sword shall perish by the champagne cocktail." ...After life? "They'll send me to hell, and I'll organize it."