Church-Amnesia on Communism, Its Roots, and Cure

06-08-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

This just so happens is not a cash-and-carry business, you’re not dealing with the A&P now. These are cannibals, Mr. Leatherby, headhunting bloodthirsty cannibals who are out to eat us up.
Lt Colonel Van Dyke schools naïve American Mr. Leatherby on the nature of the Soviets in the movie Night People 1954. To update you can paste in for Soviets “the communist government of China.”

Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever. Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, On Atheistic Communism

We expect Communists to attack the Church. That is what they do. Communism is an evil and anti-human ideology that sees religion as an opiate of the people which inhibits progress and that must be eradicated. What we do not expect is for the Church to bow to the pressure of this ideology, sacrificing her own faithful in a political game. Cardinal Joseph Zen, ArchbishopEmeritus of Hong Kong https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/06/09/a-double-persecution-the-witness-of-hong-kongs-cardinal-zen/

Recently Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordeleone penned an essay about the Church-Amnesia about communism. Here are some of his remarks: Bianca Jagger just issued a thundering warning about Nicaragua’s human rights abuses: “Just like the Castro Regime did in Cuba during the 1960s,” she wrote in the U.K.’s Independent , Nicaragua has put “harsh restrictions on religious freedom, practices, and church processions. Catholic education has been forbidden.” She even compares the country’s current purge of the Catholic Church “to Joseph Stalin’s purge of religious institutions in the Soviet Union.” Her appeal comes just a few weeks after Nicaragua’s human rights hero Bishop Rolando José Álvarez was released from jail and repatriated to Rome thanks in part to the intervention of Pope Francis. He is one of hundreds of Nicaraguan priests imprisoned and exiled in the last year. Nicaragua is following the path laid out by totalitarians in Russia, Cuba, China, and elsewhere: Shut down the Church, because otherwise the forgotten and the persecuted will have a voice. Protestant pastors are facing persecution as well.

Why do so few Americans pay attention to the horrors of Marxist-leaning regimes? For me, an even more troubling question is: Why do Catholics know so little about the martyrs and victims of the brutalities of communism? (emphasis added) …These men and women are heroes of faith who stood up before godless, murderous, totalitarian ideologies that spread across the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In earlier eras, martyrs mostly suffered at the hands of their local governing authorities; now it is a world-wide ideology, manifested in different guises, that leads the persecution. https://firstthings.com/modern-martyrs-of-communism/

However, a main reason is the misguided attempts at diplomacy with communists initiated by Pope Paul VI and continued by Pope Francis in his dealings with communist China as if the Church forgot her teaching about the nature of communism, as if the communists would reciprocate the Church’s goodwill. This was preceded by the agreement of Pope John XXIII with the Soviet Union that the Second Vatican Council would not condemn communism in exchange for the Soviets allowing Russian Orthodox observers to attend the Council even though the Russian Patriarch of that time was under the thumb of the KGB. The agreement made by Pope John was called the Metz Accord. There was no condemnation at the Council even though most of the Council’s Fathers asked for it. The policy-change of “dialog” with the communists started by Paul VI was called “Ostpolitik” because it was dealing with the eastern-bloc of communist countries. The policy pursued by Pope Francis and Cardinal Parolin with China can be called Sinopolitik. Recently Antonello Cannarozzo related the tale of this “surrender” to the communist regimes in the name of dialog and diplomacy: Pope Pius XII had attempted a dialog with the communists but to no avail and he addressed this reality: …

Pope Pacelli, (Pius XII’s surname was Pacelli) speaking of relations with communist regimes, stated among other things: «What is the point, after all, of reasoning without a common language, or how is it possible to meet, if the paths diverge, that is, if on one side the common absolute values are obstinately pushed and denied, thus making any “coexistence in truth” impossible?». Words that were meant to be a warning to future popes and their diplomatic actions, but this was not the case.

Every plea to the authorities of the Montinian Church, (the Church during the years of Pope Paul VI whose surname was Montini) especially from those who lived ‘Beyond the Iron Curtain’ and from many of their faithful, not to capitulate to the communists, instead found only indifference and often even ill-tolerance. An example to understand where these failed “openings” had led, let us recall the statements of the head of Vatican diplomacy, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, during his trip on April 8, 1974 to Fidel Castro’s island, stating that Cuban communism was compatible with the Catholic religion and without fear of shame he added: “Catholics and, in general, the Cuban people, do not have the slightest difficulty with the socialist government”. In conclusion, he also stated, in a completely unexpected way, that “the Catholics of the island are respected in their beliefs like all other citizens”.

In those years, increasingly important roles in Vatican foreign policy were played by men like Cardinals Jean-Marie Villot and Agostino Casaroli, the latter being the true weaver, together with Pope Paul VI, of Ostpolitik, a season that had already begun with some sensational gestures by Pope Roncalli,(John XXIII) such as the meeting on March 7, 1963 with Alexej Adjubei, son-in-law of the head of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, initiating what was defined as a first thaw. At the end of the meeting, Pope John said to his secretary, Msgr. Capovilla: “It could be a disappointment, or a mysterious thread of Providence that I have no right to break”. History later demonstrated that that thread was firmly in the hands of the communists. In the face of these unfortunate recitations, as in all tragedies, figures emerge who, having experienced harsh persecution by those dictatorships, had all the authority and moral strength to oppose the new policy of the Vatican, knowing full well the falsity of Marxist regimes (for example, Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty. More on these heroes in a later bulletin) …. George Weigel gives a resume of what Pope Paul’s and Cardinal Casaroli’s policy did to the Church:

Whatever its intentions, that strategy failed to create a viable Catholic situation behind the Iron Curtain. And the claim still heard in Rome that the Casaroli Ostpolitik was a great success, which paved the way for the non-violent Revolution of 1989 and the communist collapse in east central Europe, has no foundation in historical reality. The Ostpolitik turned the Catholic Church in Hungary into a virtual subsidiary of the Hungarian communist party and state. The Ostpolitik demoralized the living parts of the Church in what was then Czechoslovakia. It unnecessarily complicated the Polish Church’s situation. And it gave maneuvering room throughout the region to faux Catholic organizations composed of supporters and fellow travelers of communist regimes. Those were the realities on the ground. Every serious student of the period knows this. The Ostpolitik also provided opportunities for communist intelligence services to penetrate the Vatican and further compromise the Holy See’s negotiating positions: a nasty business I documented in the second volume of my John Paul II biography, The End and the Beginning, using original materials from the archives of the KGB, the German Stasi, the Polish SB, and others https://firstthings.com/the-casaroli-myth/

Regarding China: For years there has existed a schismatic Church in China under the thumb of the communist party. The true Church was the underground persecuted Church resistant to the communists. Given that situation the heroic Cardinal Joseph Zen has pointed out the harm caused the Church by the policy pursued by Pope Francis and Cardinal Parolin. Catholics in China experience the confusion of two parallel churches, one illegal and the other controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, the latter staffed by bishops often ordained without Vatican approval. The Vatican began legitimizing some illicitly ordained bishops, adding to the general confusion by making it difficult to perceive the line of where schism starts and stops. Although the desire for unity is good, Cardinal Zen has pointed out the process of integrating the two communities has occurred at the expense of the underground Church. The underground Church, which has had to suffer much persecution throughout the decades, now finds itself being told by the Vatican to follow bishops who are pawns of the Communist Party.
Zen describes this dreadful situation: “Over the years, the Holy See encouraged compromise rather than supporting the brave. Someone has called this compassion. What compassion? Encouraging people to accept slavery instead of getting rid of it?” (146). You can see why the Communists hate Zen and how he can be a thorn even in the side of the Vatican, describing the deal it has made with China as a “sell out of our Church!” (149).

The faithful in China experience a double persecution, threats and imprisonment from the Communists and a lack of support from Rome, which pushes them into the hands of their enemies. Zen quotes a saying, “For many years our enemies have failed to make us die. Now we have to die at the hands of our Father. All right, let’s go and die” (141). See https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/06/09/a-double-persecution-the-witness-of-hong-kongs-cardinal-zen/ The cure is the mission of the Pope and bishops to defend the Catholic Church and her martyrs and refuse to accept communist control which should be pointed out, condemned, and resisted. Church goodwill does ≠ communist goodwill, quite the contrary. Their notion of goodwill is consolidating their power and control.