Marxism, the False Gospel of the Modern World

In my early high school years, I became interested in Marxist thought through TikTok videos. The ideas presented to me seemed obvious at the time—things any reasonable person would believe. Marxism was about uplifting the working class: a goal that felt selfless to believe in. It seemed completely normal to believe in things like the common ownership of the means of production and the abolition of private property. 

I was far from the only young adult attracted to the ideas of Marxism. New statistics come out all the time, but a 2020 poll from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 30 percent of people ages 16–23 viewed Marxism favorably. Catholics should take this seriously. In his 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris, Pope Pius XI said, “Communism . . . strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.”