What are the Errors of Russia?

So Our Lady of Fatima didn't reveal everything she had come to convey in 1917. No indeed: The secret of Fatima, given in July 1917, clearly indicates that Our Lady would be visiting again later in order to reveal the First Saturdays devotion and the essential elements of the consecration of Russia.

But she also revealed a great deal in that secret, including that if her requests were not heeded, World War II would come because of the spread and effects of the errors of Russia..

And that crucial warning caught my attention in the midst of reading and study.

After all, the average Catholic who pays attention to Fatima associates the errors of Russia with the Communist totalitarianism that came into being in Russia in October/November, 1917. Many have childhood memories of praying the Rosary for peace in the world and for the conversion of Russia, and given the hard years of the Cold War, this interpretation is hardly surprising.

But it overlooks the crucial point that the errors of Russia caused World War II, according to Our Lady, and while Stalin's Russia certainly helped launch the war with his unlikely alliance with Hitler's Germany, it's a stretch to say that Communism caused Nazism, or to attempt to claim that Nazism would not have caused a world war without Communism.

How, then, can we look at the causes of the war and find their roots in Russia?

Several crucial ways.

1) One of the most influential texts in Nazi Germany was the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. According to the noted scholar Hannah Arendt, the Protocols didn't just serve the Nazis' propaganda goals of supposedly laying out a shadowy Jewish conspiracy to control the world. No--the Nazis actually used the Protocols as a "textbook for global conquest." They modeled their Third Reich off of the Protocols--and the Protocols were fabricated in Russia, and published in 1902-1903.

2) Why do we assume that when Our Lady spoke of the errors of Russia in July 1917 she was necessarily referring to solely to the errors of Communism? July was between revolutions. The Tsar had lost power, but Lenin and his heirs had not yet seized it. Indeed, had Our Lady meant to solely speak of Communism, she could easily have said so. In fact, she probably would not have spoken of Russia. She would have said, "The Soviet Union," or some other phrase that would have pointed solely at what was to come.

No. I think that when we read the secret, we need to look at Russia, both before and after the Revolutions of 1917, in order to find what Our Lady meant by the errors of Russia.

Now--a few necessary qualifications.

Key among them: There is nothing new under the sun. In the secret of Fatima, the errors of Russia are nowhere said to be new, or somehow unheard of before 1917. The errors of Russia will be errors that have been present in Russia in a particularly powerful or dominant way, not necessarily emerging for the first or only time from Russia.

Second, the errors of Russia will lead to World War II. The war was the sign that the best hour had come and gone for the First Saturdays and the consecration of Russia. It's the crucial symptom that a virus had gotten loose into the whole world.

Thirdly, our guide to which errors are at play cannot be our political party, our personal biases, or our preferences for whom Heaven condemns. Rather, our guide to error must be truth. We must know the right answers in order to discern where Russia had gone wrong, and where her errors had spread to lead the world wrong. What, then, is our touchstone? The Church, the pillar and foundation of the truth (see 1 Tim 3:15). Relying upon Scripture and Tradition, the magisterial teaching of popes and ecumenical councils, and the writings of saints and doctors, we can come to a clear perception of the errors at play by comparing them to the truth taught by the Church.

And at the core of all of the errors of Russia, I think there's one error in particular--one that a certain professor of languages diagnosed in the heart of the war itself. More to come.

Racists on the March? Send in the Pro-Life Movement!

If you're looking for a solution/something useful to do, see the end of this piece. But I wanted to try once again to explain why I'm posting about all of this to such a degree. A friend said:

"You should not be easily moved to fear. It is unwarranted."

I'm not Jewish, or black, so yeah, I personally don't have nearly as much to fear. But I am Catholic, and I am an American, and the son of a Coast Guardsman. The Nazis and the KKK are enemies of the US. They are enemies of humanity. They are enemies of the Church. Their ideologies are to be opposed absolutely, especially when they are manifesting in marches and rallies.

We who are white, who are safe and far away from these things, can all too easily assume they are nothing to be afraid of, nothing to worry about. The ideologies were defeated. Sauron was destroyed, after all, and Voldemort died trying to kill a baby, and all that's over and done with. Right?

Tell that to the folks who attend the synagogue in Charlottesville. Tell that to the black people who have to live near or alongside people who put on their klan gear on the weekends. Tell that to the non-whites watching the Vice documentary this past week.

I am not afraid--I am in Massachusetts, deep in the North, deep behind Union lines. But I am furious and afraid on behalf of all those people who shouldn't have to be furious and afraid. Not, I hope, out of moral preening, but because Jim Crow endured because so many of us thought it silly to be afraid, thought Martin Luther King a troublemaker and the Civil Rights movement a whole lot of fuss about nothing. I'm writing all this because of Munich, and Chamberlain, and a very near thing for Britain because they disarmed throughout the 1930s, for all that Churchill never stopped speaking. I'm writing all this because let's try not to leave the Jewish people alone in the face of the Nazis again, or the black folks alone in the face of the Klan again.

"Furthermore, you are not asking people to simply state their opposition to Nazisism. You have affirmatively stated that unless someone supports punching people in the face for speaking words of hate, then that person has lost his mind."

No. If you can find it and repost it, I'll acknowledge I made a mistake. But what I've been saying or trying to say is that unless someone is able to empathize and understand why BLM or Antifa or an ordinary citizen punches people in the face for being public neo-Nazis and KKK, then that person has lost his mind. I cringe every time a conservative tries to equate Antifa or BLM with the neo-Nazis and the KKK because it's ridiculous on its face. Antifa and BLM have never held all of Europe in their thrall, never built concentration camps or ovens, never put stars on the Jews or sent forth death squads, the SS. They've never held the South in their thrall, sending and receiving slave ships on which millions died, never torn apart families, had breeding programs for their slaves, never sent forth night riders to lynch or bomb civil rights leaders. To attempt such a comparison is obscene.

"I am concerned that it strikes such fear in your heart that I will not advocate instigating violence. Hopefully you let go of some of that fear long enough to see that those who are not actively advocating for and justifying violence can still be fiercely opposed to the evils of Nazism and White supremacists."

Of course the right can be fiercely opposed to the evils of Nazism and white supremacists, but act and potential are two different things. This is why I keep saying this should be easy--there're all the intellectual and historical resources in the world for Republicans and Americans of all stripes, especially Catholic Christians, to oppose Nazism and white supremacist ideologies.

I'm seeing a lot of Catholic Christians and Republicans very intently defending the president and attempting to equate BLM and Antifa with neo-Nazis and the KKK.

I'm not seeing the Republicans on Facebook fiercely opposing Nazism and the KKK.

The Federalist describes the present mess well:

... He [President Trump] is also working to destroy and discredit the American Right, pitting us against one another in vicious internecine arguments. Right now there are otherwise good people who, out of partisan habits or long-borne outrage at biased media, are trying to concoct excuses for why Trump’s Q&A wasn’t so bad and all the criticisms of it are just fake news.

It’s time for that to stop. It’s time to stop looking at the latest Trump statement in relation to how bad you think the alternative is on the Left, or how biased the media is, and instead to compare it to what we should actually expect from a president. In a country where 99 percent of the population is opposed to Nazis, it should be the easiest thing in the world for an American president to unite the country by appealing to our shared values. Only Trump could take one of the most uncontroversial ideas in American politics, the Indiana Jones Rule, and turn it into a wrenching national argument. ...

Thank God, Republican leaders in Congress are clearly speaking out against Nazism and the KKK; the bishops have spoken clearly and forcefully; various members of the president's different councils have resigned or spoken out on the Charlottesville march. But Trump supporters on Facebook? Making very clear that they'd like everyone to believe BLM and Antifa are just as bad as neo-Nazis and the KKK.

And I'm really sad about that because this shouldn't even be a thing. This is the easiest challenge in the world, really, because conservatism stands against the sort of easy disregard for the common good that led to the Confederacy and the Civil War; conservatism stands for human rights and against totalitarian governments, as happened throughout the Cold War; Christianity calls us to love our neighbor, whoever they may be, and to know that all are one in Christ Jesus, no matter their race, no matter their skin color.

This was such an easy one to knock out of the park--but here we are, arguing instead.

So here's my proposed solution.

Dear conservatives and Christians of my acquaintance: I hold that when the Nazis and the KKK try to get on board the conservative end of the spectrum--that is, when the left hasn't had to lift a finger; the Nazis and the KKK are doing the work themselves--then the Republicans need to be leading the counter-demonstrations out of sheer love of country. Nothing to do with trying to "distance" yourselves from the Nazis. Tell the left, "We've got this. We'll do the counter-protests. We'll unite the right and stand between the 'Unite the Right' rally and the synagogue. Don't bother sending in BLM or Antifa. We'll bring the Knights of Columbus, the pro-life movement, and all the churches. We'll be the ones to get rid of the KKK and the Nazis because you've always been wrong about them being conservative or Republican. We know Christianity demands us oppose these groups. Don't worry. We protest Planned Parenthood; we'll protest the Nazis and the KKK." Why? It's an easy win; all of us are bound by conviction to oppose Nazism and the KKK; and the left is doing it wrong, as this piece makes clear.

... “The main thing that [hate groups] seek is attention and publicity to disseminate a message of hate,” Robert Trestan, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Boston office, told NPR’s “All Things Considered” during an interview about today’s planned “free speech” rally on Boston Common, which some are concerned will be a magnet for hate groups. “And so the best-case scenario is they come and they speak at the Common and there is nobody there to listen.” And Moises Velasquez-Manoff, a contributing op-ed writer at the Times, explained earlier this week that according to experts, “Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled.” “I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told him. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.” Progressives would be eagerly echoing and retweeting this sort of logic if the wonks in question were talking about ISIS rather than the National Vanguard. Why should their insights suddenly be ignored?

If this line of thinking is correct, anyone disgusted by organized displays of explicit hatred should adopt a stance along the lines of this: “You know what? Let the Nazis rally. Let them try to promote a dying ideology the entire nation finds execrable. Down the road we are going to set up a big, inclusive show of solidarity that will be ten times larger. And anyone who is scared or intimidated or angry should come there, rather than risk their well-being facing down the dregs of society.” To be sure, this approach may not be as satisfying as punching Nazis, but it may increase the odds that in the future, there will be fewer Nazis to punch in the first place. ...

Let's do it right, peacefully, and far more effectively because if Christianity and conservatism makes plain the neo-Nazis and racists have no home on the right, they have no hope of a political home anywhere.

You want BLM and Antifa to become irrelevant? Publicly oppose racism in an organized fashion so they don't have occasion to riot.

Now I know the left has consistently moved the football.

And I sympathize to a degree with why conservatives are reluctant to respond to liberal challenges to condemn the Nazis, the KKK, and racism. I absolutely know how the left can attempt to demonize people or positions; I've seen the same sorts of things at Gonzaga; I agree that the ideological legacy of Communism perdures and must still be extricated from politics.

But conservatism, Christianity, and patriotism calls us to oppose the Nazis and the KKK. A pragmatic concern for ending the spectre of Antifa and BLM violence in this country calls us to publicly, clearly, consistently oppose racism, the white supremacists, and the neo-Nazis wherever they arise so that the left doesn't feel the need; so that it's taken care of.

Using the force of reason and public witness against racism is part of the new evangelization, after all, and a necessary part of developing a culture of life, leading to a civilization of love.

So come on--win big, win easily, and do the right thing, the thing demanded by conservatism and Christianity themselves--stand against the racists so the left doesn't have to, even if (when) segments of the left aren't grateful or gracious, when they wish you weren't there so they could attempt to tar you with the same brush. Do the right thing, as the pro-life movement has been doing for so long, even when it's hard, or thankless, or painful, or misunderstood.

Paulo Freire, Author of Banned Books

According to this Banned Books Week poster.

What's ironic is, firstly, they misspelled Chewie.

Secondly, the book they're featuring on that image is a rather significant entry in the literature of liberation theology. There are a number of footnotes citing Marx and Engels. Communists haven't been known as the greatest defenders of intellectual freedom in the world. Just ask George Orwell, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or Blessed Pope John Paul II.

But I do urge you to read Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  And find out who's taking it seriously.  Then ask yourself why people might find it problematic.  I don't support banning books.  I don't support destroying books.  I do support intellectually dismantling certain systems of thought.

For a very interesting reading experience, try Freire at the same time as Fr. Richard Gilsdorf's Signs of the Times: Understanding the Church Since Vatican II.  It was an eyeopening experience for me.

Gay Marriage and Queer Activists Who Oppose It

This person isn't alone, either.  Excerpts:

Today is a hard day to rain on people’s marriage parades. I’m doing it anyway because my stomach is turning to lead and my heart wants to throw up and silence will make it worse. This issue is far from over and my silence, I feel, is the problem to begin with.

I’ll start with an introduction: I am — first and foremost — a queer activist for economic justice. I support a radical redistribution of wealth, and I stand against capitalism and what it does to people’s bodies. As for marriage equality, I am not just unenthusiastic or reserved about this as a goal for the LGBT rights movement — I actively boycott it, and would like to see it abolished as soon as possible...

When you read his arguments, they have a certain familiar ring.  Excerpts:

...The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation...

Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private...--The Communist Manifesto, Chapters 1 & 2

Fatima, The Holy Fathers, and The Present

Pope Francis, Liberation Theology, and Confidently Saying The Wrong Thing

Yeeps.  Just...yeeps.

God bless the author of this piece.  She's certainly got confidence.  There're just a few things I'd like to comment on.

Jesuits: The Jesuits, or the Society of Jesus, are an order of (male) priests condoned by the Vatican that tend to take a missionary and scholarly approach to Catholicism.

"Condoned?"  As in, "barely acceptable yet tolerated?"  Howza about something like "The Jesuits are one of many religious orders within Catholicism"?

Founded by St. Ignatius in 1534, they're now best known as the administrators of several universities (Georgetown is probably the most famous one in the United States).

Okay, so they may be best known as the administrators of several universities, but they are certainly far more than that.  To start with, they have a much bigger educational footprint in the US alone than that rather lukewarm description indicates.

The Jesuits take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience to both St. Ignatius and the pope.

And here's where my mouth dropped.  Cause, you know, they really, really don't swear obedience to St. Ignatius.  Their lawful superiors?  Oh, yeah.  The pope?  Look up "fourth vow of the Jesuits."  But while Ignatius has a huge role as founder in the constitution (and constitutions) of their order, he's not someone to whom they swear obedience (however good an idea that may be).

The Daily Beast has a pretty good explainer up on the Jesuits, which you can peruse for more details.

Actually, how about you go to a Catholic source for information on a Catholic religious order?  Or even more radically, how about going to that order itself?

But there's one important moment to flag in the context of Pope Francis's election.
The order ruffled the feathers of Pope John Paul II for their involvement in liberation theology in Latin America (we're getting to that). Partially because of their involvement in the liberally-associated movement, Jesuits have a reputation for being more progressive than the Catholic church's other clergy.

Want to know what John Paul II (and, for that matter, Pope Benedict XVI when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger) actually thought about liberation theology?  See here and here.  Want to know why Pope John Paul II, a Polish pope at a time when state communism was attempting to subjugate the Polish Catholic Church and render silent its opposition to the totalitarian oppression of Soviet Communism, might have had huge problems with liberation theology?  See here and here.

Liberation Theology: First off, the "liberation theology" we're talking about when we refer to South American Catholicism is distinct from the American "black liberation theology." They trace their roots back to two different commonly-cited foundational texts: James H. Cone's A Black Theology of Liberation, and Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation, both written in the early '70s. The two theologies definitely share some significant similarities, namely a reading of scripture that puts the emphasis of the Christian concern with sin on social problems, rather than individual ones. In other words, Christians adhering to a liberation theology should orient themselves toward action against oppression. More symbolically, liberation theology argues that God identifies with the oppressed, and that Christianity should take upon itself the lens of the poor. Both theologies are also often derided as "Marxist" by conservatives (remember Rev. Wright?)

Heh.  Here's the thing: liberation theology actually is Marxist.  Don't believe me?  Check out the citations in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of the most popular and widely used books applying the concepts of the theology of liberation to education.  Look at the citations in Gutiérrez's book.  And the key problem with liberation theology isn't the concern for the poor.  It's the notion that worldly poverty matters more than spiritual poverty, that political power matters more than deification, that the secular is more important than the sacred.

The Church is, has been, and always will be an institution directed by her founder to an ongoing and perennial concern for the poor.  We are commanded explicitly to tend to the needs of the least of these or else go to hell.  But we are also told to seek first the kingdom of God, and everything else shall be added unto it.  That is, put Christ first, put holiness first, and all else will fall into place around the true, transcendent center.

Liberation theology, on the other hand, would say to hell with the Church if it didn't first physically fight oppression (which seems to inherently involve seeking the destruction of all hierarchy, which would, of course, inevitably pit the liberation theologians against the very God they claim they're trying to serve.)

On the surface, this theology would seem to fit with Pope Francis. Here's the New Yorker, summing up his approach to poverty as a Catholic:

"He has made some sharp remarks about the vanity, self-infatuation, careerism, and pursuit of promotions in the Roman Curia. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he apparently preferred to be called Father Jorge, and was known for his preoccupation with the city’s poorest, reportedly washing and kissing the feet of patients suffering from AIDS."

But Francis has opposed liberation theology in Argentina. According to the National Catholic Reporter, this seems to have to do more with keeping Jesuits from becoming politically active or working directly in community groups—which would be a departure from the more traditional role of the order—than it does with rejecting an interpretation of Catholicism that places an emphasis on the poor.

I don't think there's any interpretation of Catholicism accepted within the Church that doesn't place a healthy emphasis on the poor.  No pope has ever rejected care for the poor.  Ever.

So while the emphasis on poverty could very well become a part of Francis's reign (and looks bound to), we know very little of what, if any, reforms he'd want to implement to make the church more effective at alleviating suffering from poverty. Despite his "firsts," there's little evidence so far that the new Pope has radical change in mind for the church.

Radical change?  Yes he does--holiness, with all the impossible transformations that will bring.

Ayn Rand Sounds Like Marx

Or so the following would seem to indicate:

...Cardinal Ratzinger, in his homilies on creation, talked about a "change of paradigm in our understanding of the commission to exercise dominion" delivered to man:

How did the mentality of power and activity, which threatens us all today, ever come to be? One of the first indications of a new way of looking at things appeared about the time of the Renaissance with Galileo, when he said that if nature did not voluntarily answer our questions but hid her secrets from us, then we would submit her to torture and in a wracking inquisition extract the answers from her that she would otherwise not give. The construction of the instruments of the natural sciences was for him as it were a readying of this torture, whereby the human person, despot-like, gets the answer that he wants to have from the accused.--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,, "In The Beginning...", p. 49.

At that time, a new kind of knowledge was being sought--not what things are, what constitutes their "nature", or, to put it another way, what their "logos" is, the divine idea that is being expressed in them--but rather what we can make out of them for ourselves. This approach to reality is called "power knowledge."...

In order to establish this kind of "power knowledge", the idea of a Creator had to be set aside. It had to be made possible as a "hypothesis", to dispense with him.  It was a matter of eliminating any "language of creation", and thereby any message from the Creator, so that sheer utility, with no limitations or handicaps, becomes the model that determines everything.  The question regarding a Creator had to be declared meaningless, as did the question of his commission to us in creation.  In its place a different basic commission for man had to be formulated: "This is the source of the change in humanity's fundamental direction vis-a-vis the world; it was at this point that progress became the real truth and matter became the material out of which human beings would create a world that was worth being lived in."(Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,, "In The Beginning...", pg. 50)

The two ideologies that this "power knowledge", dissociated from the Creator and the creation, brought into a largely dominant position during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were Marxism and Darwinism (to be distinguished, once again as an ideological trend, from Darwin's scientific theory). The young Karl Marx drew up the following basic outline:

A being cannot call itself independent until it can stand on its own feet; and it stands on its own feet when it owes its existence to itself.  A man who lives by the grace of someone else regards himself as a dependent being.  And yet I live entirely by someone else's grace if I owe to him not only the sustenance of my life, but if besides that he has created my life; if he is the source of my life--and my life necessarily has such a basis outside itself, if it is not my own creation.  Creation is thus a concept that is difficult to drive out of the consciousness of ordinary people.--Karl Marx, translated from Nationalokonomie und Philosophie.  Fruhschriften [National economy and philosophy: early writings]  (Stuttgart, 1955), p. 246, cited in Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Chance or Purpose?: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (Ignatius Press, 2007), 156

Not to owe one's existence to anyone else is certainly the presupposition for empowering oneself to be one's own Creator. It is certainly no accident that Friedrich Engels, after reading Darwin's Origin of Species, wrote enthusiastically to Marx that here they had found the scientific basis for their theory...

The era of ideologies is at an end. However, the paradigm of "power knowledge", the ideology of the domination of nature as mere matter for our scientific/technical/economic will to power to work on--a domination dissociated from belief in creation, and the responsibility for creation that is founded on it--has not yet perished. Now, as in the past, our culture is dominated by a way of thinking that sees the world as a product of chance and necessity rather than as the utterance and the challenge of the Creator. Now, as in the past, the idea of utility is largely dominant within the ethical debates about whether what we can do is permissible...--Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Chance or Purpose?: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (Ignatius Press, 2007), 156

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.

Laborem Exercens, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Centesimus Annus: The Social Doctrine of Blessed Pope John Paul II

From the invaluable Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Excerpts:

...Ninety years after Rerum Novarum, Pope John Paul II devoted the Encyclical Laborem Exercens [187] to work, the fundamental good of the human person, the primary element of economic activity and the key to the entire social question. Laborem Exercens outlines a spirituality and ethic of work in the context of a profound theological and philosophical reflection. Work must not be understood only in the objective and material sense, but one must keep in mind its subjective dimension, insofar as it is always an expression of the person. Besides being a decisive paradigm for social life, work has all the dignity of being a context in which the person's natural and supernatural vocation must find fulfilment.

With the Encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis[188], Pope John Paul II commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Populorum Progressio and deals once more with the theme of development along two fundamental lines: “on one hand, the dramatic situation of the modern world, under the aspect of the failed development of the Third World, and on the other, the meaning of, conditions and requirements for a development worthy of man”[189]. The Encyclical presents differences between progress and development, and insists that “true development cannot be limited to the multiplication of goods and service — to what one possesses — but must contribute to the fullness of the ‘being' of man. In this way the moral nature of real development is meant to be shown clearly”[190]. Pope John Paul II, alluding to the motto of the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, “opus iustitiae pax” (peace is the fruit of justice), comments: “Today, one could say, with the same exactness and the same power of biblical inspiration (cf. Is 32:17; Jas 3:18), opus solidaritatis pax (peace is the fruit of solidarity)”[191].

On the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope John Paul II promulgates his third social encyclical, Centesimus Annus[192], whence emerges the doctrinal continuity of a hundred years of the Church's social Magisterium. Taking up anew one of the fundamental principles of the Christian view of social and political organization, which had been the central theme of the previous Encyclical, the Pope writes: “What we nowadays call the principle of solidarity ... is frequently stated by Pope Leo XIII, who uses the term ‘friendship' ... Pope Pius XI refers to it with the equally meaningful term ‘social charity'. Pope Paul VI, expanding the concept to cover the many modern aspects of the social question, speaks of a ‘civilization of love”'[193]. Pope John Paul II demonstrates how the Church's social teaching moves along the axis of reciprocity between God and man: recognizing God in every person and every person in God is the condition of authentic human development. The articulate and in-depth analysis of the “new things”, and particularly of the great breakthrough of 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet system, shows appreciation for democracy and the free economy, in the context of an indispensable solidarity.

Other tallies of the social encyclicals include Evangelium Vitae on this list.

Non Abbiamo Bisgno, Mit Brennender Sorge, Divini Redemptoris: Papal Condemnations of Communism and Fascism

No, the Popes were not silent in the face of Nazism or Communism. From the invaluable Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Excerpts:

...Pope Pius XI did not fail to raise his voice against the totalitarian regimes that were being imposed in Europe during his pontificate. Already on 29 June 1931 he had protested against the abuse of power by the totalitarian fascist regime in Italy with the Encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno[155]. He published the Encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, on the situation of the Catholic Church under the German Reich, on 14 March 1937[156]. The text of Mit Brennender Sorge was read from the pulpit of every Catholic Church in Germany, after having been distributed in the greatest of secrecy. The Encyclical came out after years of abuse and violence, and it had been expressly requested from Pope Pius XI by the German Bishops after the Reich had implemented ever more coercive and repressive measures in 1936, particularly with regard to young people, who were required to enrol as members of the Hitler Youth Movement. The Pope spoke directly to priests, religious and lay faithful, giving them encouragement and calling them to resistance until such time that a true peace between Church and State would be restored. In 1938, with the spreading of anti-Semitism, Pope Pius XI affirmed: “Spiritually we are all Semites”[157].

With the Encyclical Letter Divini Redemptoris[158], on atheistic communism and Christian social doctrine, Pope Pius XI offered a systematic criticism of communism, describing it as “intrinsically perverse”[159], and indicated that the principal means for correcting the evils perpetrated by it could be found in the renewal of Christian life, the practice of evangelical charity, the fulfilment of the duties of justice at both the interpersonal and social levels in relation to the common good, and the institutionalization of professional and interprofessional groups...

See also Summi Pontificatus on the brotherhood of all humanity.

The Trillion Dollar Coin

I'm sorry, but is there a universe in which this sounds like a good idea?  Excerpts:

...the law inadvertently gave the Treasury secretary the power to mint, say, a $1 trillion coin, or even a $5 trillion coin, or even a $1 quadrillion coin.

Rather than selling it, he might deposit it at the Federal Reserve. Presto! The shiny new asset would erase a trillion dollars in debt liabilities. Then, the Treasury could carry out its spending — including disbursing Social Security checks and Medicare payments — without hitting the ceiling, a cap on total debt issuance that currently stands at about $16.4 trillion.

When Congress raised the ceiling again, the administration could then take the platinum coin and destroy it. With a token the size of a penny, the White House could head off another round of Congressional brinkmanship and another run at a fiscal cliff...

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which mocked up a fake trillion-dollar coin with President Obama’s face on it, noted the absurdity of the idea by saying that the amount of platinum it would take to mint a trillion-dollar coin would sink the Titanic.

(A technical point, but a relevant one: such a coin would not need to contain a trillion dollars’ worth of platinum.)...

This is one of those times when having a fiat currency seems like a really, really bad idea.  The whole suggestion sounds awfully like this, only without the whole hoax aspect.

Materialism Disproved

Because it cannot handle the existence of meaning. Excerpts:

...Greene writes that "a staunch reductionist would claim that...in principle absolutely everything, from the big bang to daydreams, can be described in terms of underlying microscopic physical processes involving the fundamental constituents of matter." Good stuff. I'm with him so far. But here's where he loses me: "If you understand everything about the ingredients, the reductionist argues, you understand everything."

If you understand the ingredients, you understand everything. I think this is a perfect summary of where modern atheism goes off the rails. A computer program could read and analyze the words of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, and even answer questions about its content. It could "understand" all the ingredients perfectly. But does that mean that it has grasped the essence of Sonnet 18? Scientists could attach a neuroimaging device to the head of a man who is reunited with the woman he loves after a long absence. The scientists could describe in great detail every part of his brain that was in use when she first walked in the room, and explain precisely how all the neurons were firing as he gazed at her. Would that data alone fully capture the moment?...

Fulton Sheen, New Evangelization, and Grace

Brandon Vogt cites a man with a plan.  Excerpts:

Who was the greatest Catholic evangelist of the twentieth century? To me it’s no contest: Venerable Fulton J. Sheen. Some might argue for Pope John Paul II, who had a bigger impact on the world. Others might claim Mother Teresa, whose smile and sari were certainly more recognizable. But in terms of evangelization, I don’t think anyone drew more people into the Church than Sheen.

His success was due in large part to his mastery of new media, which in his day meant radio and television...

Gah! Atlas Shrugged Rises Again!

Behold!  Atlas Shrugged...2!  Excerpts:

The second installment of what will—Rand willing—become an epic trilogy based on the objectivist ur-text Atlas Shrugged is even more implausible than the first. By the conventional economics of the film industry “Atlas Shrugged Part II,” which opens to around 500 theaters this October, should never have been made.

Unless the movie in question involves simply tacking another numeral on to a field-tested franchise like “Scary Movie” or “Final Destination,” universal derision from critics and a box office loss are usually enough to count a sequel out. And yet here’s the next installment of “Atlas Shrugged” anyway, not limping straight to DVD but doubling the size of its theatrical release, having added $20 million to its budget, 20 minutes to its run-time, and a new cast...

The Catholic Church, Secularization, and Survival

Let's reuse what worked, shall we?  Excerpts:

...The cardinal noted that religious freedom was guaranteed in the Soviet constitution too, while the reality was very different and highly constrained. Some Russian Orthodox Church leaders had KGB rank and perquisites.

The most prominent Catholic opponent to this Cold War reality was, of course, Cardinal Wojtyla of Poland, later Pope John Paul II. He provided a four-point plan for the Church in those circumstances:

Why Pray?

An interesting insight.  Excerpts:

...A cross, a statue, a saint’s name — what they communicate is more loaded with transcendent promise than any moment that originates in humanity, and certainly steadier and more faithful to the intention of our ultimate good, than any man, no matter how charismatic, no matter how well-spoken, no matter how well-versed on “policy”.

When I read stories like this out of Vietnam, I recall the wise words of the late Mother Mary Francis, PCC, in her terrific book, The Right to be Merry:

The children of light walk heedless of the source of their light. The children of darkness know better. And when the hour of darkness is at hand in any country, the first act of the powers of evil is invariably to throw the switch. They raze the cloisters. They turn the contemplatives out of their monasteries with loud speeches about the good of the state and about contributing to the social need. [...]

Pills from Northeastern China Smuggled Into Korea: "IT'S PEOPLE!"

Well. Your "human interest" story of the...well. Excerpts:

South Korea has seized thousands of smuggled drug capsules filled with powdered flesh from dead babies, which some people believe can cure disease, officials said Monday. The capsules were made in northeastern China from babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder, the Korea Customs Service said. Customs officials refused to say where the dead babies came from or who made the capsules, citing possible diplomatic friction with Beijing. Chinese officials ordered an investigation into the production of drugs made from dead fetuses or newborns last year. The customs office has discovered 35 smuggling attempts since August of about 17,450 capsules disguised as stamina boosters, and some people believe them to be a panacea for disease, the customs service said in a statement. The capsules of human flesh, however, contained bacteria and other harmful ingredients. The smugglers told customs officials they believed the capsules were ordinary stamina boosters and did not know the ingredients or manufacturing process...

What might have conceivably inspired such a move?

Occupy Wall Street and Revolution

So sometimes you just need to stop talking and listen to what someone is saying.  Case in point.  Excerpts:

“It’s up to you to decide if our movement goes the way of Paris ’68, the dust bin of could-have-been-insurrections, or something more daring, more inspiring, something not yet dreamed...

Will you allow Occupy to become a project of the old left, the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades? Will you allow MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry to put the brakes on our Spring Offensive and turn our struggle into a “99% Spring” reelection campaign for President Obama?

Whatever you do, don’t allow our revolutionary struggle to fizzle out into another lefty whine and clicktivist campaign like has happened so many times in the past...

Okay, having listened, first of all--"clicktivists"?

A Third Way

Why did it have to be this way with religion--with her life as a Catholic--that she could not join these marching men and women?  Christ most certainly was with the marchers.  They were "His comrades."

She was emotionally overwrought, obviously, but her feelings, nevertheless, were expressive of a profound illness that had become acute in the body of Christendom. Those who professed Jesus had not made him Lord of history but history's lackey. And Dorothy, whose heart had always been drawn to the dispossessed, who had always stood aside from the main course that was crowded with persons struggling toward their bourgeois heaven, knew that the Christ they said was helping them in their struggle for bourgeoisity was really the anti-Christ.

"Is there no choice but that between Communism and industrial capitalism?" she asked. "Is Christianity so old that it has become stale, and is Communism the brave new torch that is setting the world afire?" How strange it was that "when Catholics begin to realize their brotherhood and betake themselves to the poor and to all races, then it is that they are accused of being Communists?"

"When the demonstration was over and I had finished writing my story," she said, "I went to the national shrine at the Catholic University on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.  There I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor."--William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, pg. 226.

The Marxist Lens

During World War II, a French Communist wrote an article reprinted in the New Masses which emphasized the need for a Communist in the Sorbonne or any other college to teach history or science from a Communist point of view.  The party never misses the dominant importance of philosophy.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 227

This is, of course, still done.