No to Christian-Communist Collaboration

Just when one hopes against hope it couldn’t get any worse, the politically inept and immoderate pontiff has now called for greater dialogue and cooperation between Christians, on the one hand, and Marxists and Communists, on the other. In recent remarks to DIALOP, a group dedicated to dialogue and political cooperation between Christians and Marxists, Francis lauded such cooperation to fight war and injustice and to “imagine a ‘better world.’” His statement shows no evidence that Francis understands Communism on the level of theory or practice or the limits of this-worldly utopian “dreaming” as he calls it. “[T]he great dreams of freedom, and equality, of dignity and fraternity” are deemed “a reflection of God’s dream,” and they alone are said to have “produced progress and advances.” These naïve effusions ignore the murderous consequences of ill-conceived dreams being put into revolutionary practice, and the confiscation of political, intellectual, and religious liberty that inevitably has accompanied the replacement of political reason and moderation by coercive utopianism. How have Christians actually fared in the Soviet Union, Communist China, the People’s Republics of East-Central Europe and in North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam? To ask the question is to answer it. In past weeks Catholic bishops have been arrested in both Marxist Nicaragua and the People’s Republic of China (although the Nicaraguan bishop and a score of other clerics have just been exiled to the Vatican—hardly a victory for true political or religious liberty). Perhaps it is time for the pope to take note.