Undated photo of St. Peter's Basilica during Second Vatican Council. (Lothar Wolleh/Wikipedia)
Conversations with Father Robert Imbelli have been a great blessing in recent years. I have rarely met a more even-tempered and gracious man: a true churchman who, in retirement after years of teaching theology at Boston College, tries diligently to keep the often-fratricidal subtribes of American Catholicism in some sort of conversation (if only through his e-mail account!). We’ve visited in Rome during several Synods and I remember with pleasure the tour he gave me of the Capranica, his Roman alma mater, where his fellow alumni include Popes Benedict XV and Pius XII.
I’ve had occasion before to mention Father Imbelli’s fine book, Rekindling the Christic Imagination: Theological Meditations for the New Evangelization. In that small gem, Imbelli made two points I’ve tried to make, doubtless less elegantly, in Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church and The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission. Where evangelization flourishes in the Church today, it’s because Jesus Christ – crucified and risen, the unique savior of the world – is at the center of the Church’s proclamation, worship, and service. And where evangelization lags or is moribund, it’s because of a deficit in Christ-centeredness.
In “No Decapitated Body,” a bracing essay published In the current issue of Nova et Vetera, Father Imbelli develops his argument for a more radically Christ-centered Church, sheds light on a host of current Catholic controversies and concerns, and does so with an authorial calm that nonetheless conveys his passion for Christ and the Gospel.
Why has the great promise of Vatican II been frustrated so often? In a word, according to Father Imbelli, because of apostasy: a drastic dissolution of the Christ-centeredness that theology sought to recover in the first half of the 20th century and that the Council affirmed. The greatest of Vatican II’s documents, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, begins, Imbelli reminds us, with the ringing affirmation, “Christ is the light of the nations.” And the entire Council, he suggests, must be interpreted through the prism of that confession of faith – “In many ways, the Council’s achievement could be read as a prolonged meditation upon the meaning and implications of Saint’s Paul’s confession – ‘For no other foundation can anyone lay that that which has been laid: Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 3:11).”
This seems to me exactly right. It squares with John XXIII’s intention for Vatican II. And it’s empirically confirmed by looking around the world Church today. Where the Council is interpreted in that Christ-centered way, evangelization thrives and the Church lives. By contrast, where Christ is not believed to be the unique way to God, the unique truth about God and us, and the uniquely life-giving savior, there is ecclesial desiccation. A rinsed out Christ substitutes for the Son of God who “came to cast fire upon the earth” (Luke 12:49); the Church falls into the culturally seductive trap of being a non-governmental organization in the business of good works; evangelization withers; local Churches die. This is most painfully obvious in Germany and other German-speaking lands, but it’s true across the full spectrum of Catholic life.
Father Imbelli explores how this forgetting of Christ shows up in various ways: in liturgy that does not begin from the premise that “the prime agent of the celebration [is] the Head of the Body,” on whom every sacramental act is totally dependent; in a dissecting room approach to the Bible and to preaching that does not convey the living presence of the one who is “the Word” (John 1:1) in the divinely-inspired Word of God; in attempts to set “doctrine” against “pastoral practice.” Certain voices in the Church incorrectly blame all of this on Vatican II. Yet it was the Council that taught that Jesus Christ is the one who acts in Baptism, the Eucharist, and the other sacraments, and it was the Council that insisted on the reality of God’s self-revelation in Scripture. As for the juxtaposition of the “doctrinal” and the “pastoral,” or “truth and mercy,” well, as Father Imbelli reminds us, the Synod of 1985 taught that “it is not licit to separate the pastoral character [of Vatican II] from the doctrinal vigor of the documents.”
Father Imbelli’s Nova et Vetera essay is a call to hope: that the Council’s Christ-centeredness will be recovered and made the engine of evangelization. That hope is well-founded, because that’s what’s happening where the Church lives.
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Atheist, racist, bigot, sexist: The truth about the demonic Karl Marx
“Those who say that Karl Marx,” states Dr. Paul Kengor, author of The Devil and Karl Marx, “was somehow doing Christian social justice or some such nonsense make fools of themselves.”
A 2018 photo of a statue of Karl Marx, created by sculptor Wu Weishan on the occasion of Marx' 200th birthday, located at Simeonstiftplatz, Trier, Germany. (Image: Yvain2908/Wikipedia)
In 1999, Harvard University Press published The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, revealing a “tragedy of planetary dimensions.” It documented the untold atrocities of communism and all the people whose lives and livelihood were crushed by the dictatorship of the proletariat from Stalin’s gulag, to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to the dictatorships of the proletariat established all over Eastern-Central Europe. Any serious reader of The Black Book of Communism would never buy into the evil of communism: the oppression, the culture of death, and the class struggle the system generated. One would expect that “the door to Utopia” of socialism and communism would have effectively closed for good.
But this did not happen: the idea of the socialist and communist utopia has made a comeback. In a recent book entitled The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration, Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College and senior director and chief academic fellow at the college’s Institute for Faith and Freedom, provides a sophisticated and well-documented analysis of communism by going to the source: Karl Marx. Dr. Kengor recently corresponded about his book and the demonic forces at work in the life and thought of Marx.
CWR: According to a 2020 Gallup poll, 45% of Americans say they would vote for a socialist for president. This is a considerable number and socialist views have been making a steady comeback after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Did the comeback of socialism urge you to publish the book?
Paul Kengor: It has prompted me to write many books on the subject, and countless articles. This is a pattern I’ve watched develop for 30 years, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
For about 20 years I’ve traveled around the country giving talks on campuses with titles like, “Why Communism Is Bad,” sponsored by the likes of the wonderful Young America’s Foundation. I’ve watched and warned that the post-Cold War generation was not learning the lessons of the Cold War and of the destruction of communism and socialism and this latest twaddle that bills itself as “democratic socialism.” I’ve observed the numbers climb yearly in support of these ridiculous philosophies, and I’ve pleaded with people (especially parents, and particularly Catholic-Christian parents) not to send their kids to these awful secular universities. They didn’t listen. Now, we have an entire generation of young people born after the Berlin Wall (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was literally an infant when the Berlin Wall fell) who have been completely miseducated about the horrors of Marxism and socialism.
They’ve learned little to nothing about how bad Marxism and Marx were. And now we’re paying the price.
CWR: There are philosophers (Umberto Galimberti, for example) who still maintain that Marx was a great Christian because for him the past was social injustice, the present made the contradictions of capitalism explode, and justice will be established only in the future. Is this the case, according to your findings?
Paul Kengor: Those who make that claim exhibit profound ignorance. Frankly, it is shocking, truly hard to believe. It is flatly and factually incorrect and utterly and wholly indefensible. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and the founders of the American Communist Party would disagree with them. And obviously, the Roman Catholic Church would disagree with them. If they’d like, they can grab a highlighter and start highlighting passage after passage and quote after quote in my book underlining examples.
Here’s one:
“Communism begins where atheism begins,” said Karl Marx. Of Christianity, Marx added: “The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility. The social principles of Christianity are hypocritical…. So much for the social principles of Christianity.”
The Roman Catholic Church condemned communism as a “satanic scourge” conceived by “the sons of darkness.” Of socialism, in 1931 Pope Pius XI issued his seminal Quadragesimo Anno, where he stated: “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”
Even Dorothy Day’s The Catholic Worker insisted: “no true Catholic can be a member of the Communist Party.”
I could go on and on. Those who say that Karl Marx was somehow doing Christian social justice or some such nonsense make fools of themselves.
One of the worst articles I’ve ever seen in the Catholic press was a piece published by the Jesuit America Magazine in the summer of 2019, titled “The Catholic Case for Communism.” I was aghast. Marx and Engels and Lenin would have been aghast as well.
CWR: Why do you think we hear so little about the atrocities of communism?
Paul Kengor: Very simple: Because the political left, which dominates education and especially our universities, does not focus on it. It’s not that typical liberal professors are pro-communist, but, as the late Richard Pipes liked to note, they are anti-anti-communist. They would prefer to condemn anti-communists rather than condemn pro-communists. Communism just doesn’t register very loudly on their outrage meter.
They will scream until they’re blue in the face about gender theory, queer theory, critical theory, “intersectionality,” you name it. But they simply don’t get worked up about the crimes of communism. Besides, in their view, the communists had many “good” intentions.
CWR: For Marx and Marxists, nothing matters but the material world as revealed in the present. Religion is to be eradicated, because it debilitates and opiates the proletariat. Why was Marx so against religion?
Paul Kengor: Marx understood that to initiate the revolution, the Judeo-Christian foundation needed to be razed. The house needed to be burnt to the ground.
In their really important work, The German Ideology, Marx and Engels said that in order to achieve “the success of the cause … it is necessary that man himself should suffer a massive change.” This change must come through “a revolution,” a process of “overthrowing” the old “filthy yoke.” His “generation,” like the Jews whom Moses led out of the wilderness, must “conquer a new world” and “must also perish in order to make room for the people who are fit for a new world.”
But to get there, they had to take down the Judeo-Christian foundation: not just Christianity, but Judaism. “The Israelite faith is repulsive to me,” said Marx. It’s quite telling that in his essay declaring religion “the opium of the people,” Marx said that “the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.” Marx had a favorite quote from Goethe’s Faust: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” In a letter to Arnold Ruge he called for the “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”
Beyond ruthless criticism, there was ruthless abolition. The word “abolition” is omnipresent throughout Marx’s writings. As his biographer Robert Payne noted, the word almost seems to jump off every page of the Manifesto.
Marx wanted to burn down the house.
CWR: There is an even darker side of Marx: he was obsessed with the demonic, as expressed in his early poetry. Some scholars have suggested that Marx was possessed by demons. The man who wrote about the specter of communism that was haunting Europe wrote about the specters and monsters haunting him. Can you explain why the demonic side of Marx has been kept secret?
Paul Kengor: I deal with that very carefully, and why Marx’s hagiographers have studiously avoided it. I do not hazard to assess whether Marx was, say, possessed, though others have. “There were times when Marx seemed to be possessed by demons,” recorded Robert Payne in his seminal 1968 biography of Marx—probably the best and most insightful biography of Marx. Payne, a man of arts and literature, not a right-winger, and a respected academic not expected to level such a shocking charge lightly, asserted of Marx: “He had the devil’s view of the world, and the devil’s malignity. Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil.” Read my book and you’ll get an exhaustive walk through all of that ugliness. It isn’t pretty.
CWR: The situation in Marx’s household was desperate, to say the least. His wife wished that she and her children were safely in their graves, as their lives on earth were hell. Why? Marx’s sexual relationship with the nursemaid, whom he exploited ruthlessly and never paid for her services, included fulfilling his sexual appetite when his wife was ill. This nursemaid was Marx’s contact with the working class, providing free labor and free sex. Was Marx showcasing what socialism had in store for the working class?
Paul Kengor: I believe so. Karl had a sexual relationship with the young nursemaid, Helene Demuth, known as “Lenchen.” Actually, it isn’t quite right to say that Lenchen worked for the Marx family, given that she toiled without pay, almost as Karl’s chattel. The champion of the proletariat never paid Lenchen a penny.
Karl, who refused to bathe, groom, and suffered from boils all over his body (including his penis), bedded Lenchen behind his wife Jenny’s back. Some biographers have pondered whether this was consensual. Either way, in June 1851, Lenchen gave birth. Marx, being the kind of man he was, never acknowledged the little boy, nor paid a penny of child support. He left all of that to Engels, his chief sap, subsidizer, and sugar-daddy.
Karl’s long-suffering wife was crushed. He already put the poor woman through hell via his refusal to work.
CWR: Marx denied his daughters an education and careers. He looked down upon women. The situation in Marx’s household was so toxic that two of his daughters committed suicide. Was Marx showcasing what socialism had in store for women?
Paul Kengor: I find this so ironic. And feminist Marxists totally ignore it. He lamented to Engels: “My wife, alas, delivered a girl and not a boy.” He later lamented to one of his daughters, who likewise gave birth to a girl: “I congratulate you on the happy delivery…. I prefer the ‘male’ sex among children who will be born at this turning point in history.”
Marx’s daughters lived lives of hopelessness and despair. In fact, four of Marx’s six children died before he did. Marx’s two surviving daughters committed suicide in joint suicide pacts with their husbands. Imagine that. Oh, and Marx wrote about suicide pacts in his devilish poetry.
CWR: Marx is considered to be a racist and anti-Semite. His ugly statements against blacks and Jews are notorious. He denigrated his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, of Cuban origin, as “Negrillo” and called him a “Gorilla.” Why did Marx despise blacks and Jews when, in fact, he and his family were of Jewish origin converted to Christianity? Why the self-hate?
Paul Kengor: Here’s a quick pop quiz for you: Who said this? “This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid.” Or this: “[He] has the blemish customarily found in the negro tribe—no sense of shame, by which I mean shame about making a fool of oneself.” Answer: No, not the grand wizard of the KKK, but Karl Marx. He was wickedly racist.
Another pop quiz. Who said this? “The emancipation of the Jews, in the final analysis, is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” No, not Hitler. Karl Marx.
In his seminal edited volume on Karl Marx and religion, Saul Padover said that Marx represented “what the Germans call Selbsthass (self-hate), a trait which Karl Marx displayed throughout his whole life.”
I recently wrote an article asking why our wondrous progressives in the cancel culture haven’t canceled Karl Marx. He was a bigot, a racist, an anti-Semite, and a sexist. Why does Marx get a pass? Answer: because the left likes him.
CWR: Why was the Roman Catholic Church so vehemently against communism, opposing this lethal ideology, even before the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848? How did communist ideology infiltrate into Roman Catholic seminaries?
Paul Kengor: This is a major part of the book, and perhaps one of the most halting sections of the book for churchgoing Christians. Part 4 is called “Infiltration and Manipulation.” It includes six chapters on the very deliberate and cynical infiltration of churches by communists in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Communists had striking success with the penetration of the mainline Protestant denominations, particularly the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, and what became Presbyterian Church USA.
Emboldened by those successes, communists then went after the Roman Catholic Church in the 1930s, specifically via Communist Party USA’s so-called “outstretched hand” effort. I publish a 1937 secret memo from Communist Party USA (it was held in the Soviet Comintern Archives on CPUSA) in which the comrades in New York City salivated like Pavlov’s dogs over the numbers before them: 18 million Catholics in America, and 80,000 simply between New York’s 110th Street and 59th Street. At the height of its membership, the Party never had more than (at best) 100,000 members. American communists figured that if they could pick up even one percent of American Catholics, they would explode their membership rolls and could dramatically undermine parishes from within.
Most troubling, there was an attempt to infiltrate Catholic seminaries. This has been reported over the years (very sloppily so) regarding the organizing efforts of ex-communist and Catholic convert Bella Dodd, who, it has been claimed, attempted to place “over a thousand communist men” in Catholic seminaries. I walk through those claims very carefully. Did she really say that? How might that have been accomplished? Was she capable? Was that even feasible? And, if so, what has been the impact?
Alas, for those answers, you’ll have to get the book!
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Ines Angeli Murzaku (http://academic.shu.edu/orientalia/) is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, Director of Catholic Studies Program and the Founding Chair of the Department of Catholic Studies at Seton Hall University. She earned a doctorate of research from the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome part of the Pontifical Gregorian University Consortium and has held visiting positions at the Universities of Bologna and Calabria in Italy and University of Münster in Germany. She is a regular commentator to media outlets on religious matters. She has worked for or collaborated with the Associated Press, CNN, Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Voice of America, Relevant Radio, The Catholic Thing, Crux, The Record, The Stream, Vatican Radio (Vatican City), and EWTN (Rome). Dr. Murzaku is currently writing a book on St. Mother Teresa entitled Mother Teresa: The Saint of the Peripheries who Became Catholicism’s Center Piece to be published by Paulist Press in 2020.
CNA Staff, Sep 1, 2020 / 05:02 pm (CNA).- Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Minsk-Mohilev, who has been blocked from returning to Belarus, said Tuesday that he was “very much surprised” by being stopped at the Polish border.
“I have been traveling often … so I was surprised very much yesterday when I was stopped at the border when I was coming back home from Poland,” the archbishop told CNA Sept. 1.
He added that such things “never happened”.
Belarus has seen widespread protests in recent weeks following a disputed presidential election. Protests began Aug. 9 after president Alexander Lukashenko was declared to have won that day’s election with 80% of the vote. Lukashenko has been president of Belarus since the position was created in 1994.
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, who has been visiting Poland, was stopped by Belarusian border guards at the crossing between Kuźnica and Bruzgi Aug. 31.
In a message to the Catholics of Belarus, the archbishop said the decision to deny him entry to Belarus was “absolutely incomprehensible”, “unreasonable and illegal”.
According to the state-owned Belarusian Telegraph Agency, Lukashenko addressed the incident involving Kondrusiewicz Sept. 1, saying that he did not possess full information about the event. He suggested that the archbishop might be a citizen of more than one country.
“We are looking into the matter. I do not claim it. We want to study the issue. If everything is according to the law, we will act accordingly. It does not matter whether he is the main Catholic, the main Orthodox, or the main Muslim. He has to live by the law. If you mix church and politics and call for believers, Catholics, who are wonderful people, there is double responsibility for that,” Belta quoted him as saying.
Bishop Yury Kasabutski, an auxiliary to Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, said the archbishop’s citizenship status was clear.
“Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz has only one citizenship — Belarusian, and according to the law, his right to enter cannot be restricted in any way,” Bishop Kasabutski stated.
The archbishop was born in 1946 in Odelsk, in what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (part of the USSR), to an ethnic Polish family. The Byelorussian SSR was succeeded in 1991 by the Republic of Belarus.
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz told CNA that “In Belarusian law, a citizen of Belarus has a right to travel, has a right to leave the country and to come back. About leaving, it’s written they can stop sometimes, but to come back is a right without any restrictions. So I don’t know what happened.”
He added, “today I was accused that I received from Warsaw some instructions, or something, but I didn’t visit Warsaw.”
The archbishop said he visited eastern Poland to celebrate the First Communion of a relative; he is now in Białystok.
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz wrote an email to Belarus’ special border committee Sept. 1 asking for an explanation of his refused entry, and is awaiting a reply.
The archbishop has spoken in defense of protests following last month’s presidential election.
He demanded an investigation last week into reports that riot police blocked the doors of a Catholic church in Minsk while clearing away protesters from a nearby square.
He met with Interior Minister Yuri Karaev Aug. 21 to express his concerns about the government’s heavy-handed response to the protests.
He prayed outside a prison Aug. 19 where detained protesters were reported to have been tortured.
Protests have taken place across Belarus since the August election, and thousands of protesters have been detained. According to the BBC, at least four people have died in the unrest.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said the election “was not free and fair,” citing “severe restrictions on ballot access for candidates, prohibition of local independent observers at polling stations, intimidation tactics employed against opposition candidates, and the detentions of peaceful protesters and journalists.”
Electoral officials said that the opposition candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, earned 10% of the vote. She was detained for several hours after complaining to the electoral committee, and has fled to Lithuania.
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz told CNA that “at the present time, we are asking for prayer, not only for the Catholic Church, but for a peaceful solution for the situation in Belarus because I’m very much afraid of civil war. The situation is very, very difficult, very critical.”
He expressed appreciation “to Catholics around the world for their solidarity, for their prayers, for their moral support in this very critical time for my nation.”
Luke Coppen contributed to this report.
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