As we move into the 1800s, Pope Benedict XVI offers his view of the emergence of and attraction to communism in his analysis of (t)he transformation of Christian faith-hope in the modern age. The 1% devised a new form of practical enslavement for the factories of the so-called Industrial Revolution. The Church misses an opportunity to imitate its Master and advocate for the needy. Many are attracted to a new ideology which seemed to offer more hope than the Christian faith.
20. The nineteenth century held fast to its faith in progress as the new form of human hope, and it continued to consider reason and freedom as the guiding stars to be followed along the path of hope. Nevertheless, the increasingly rapid advance of technical development and the industrialization connected with it soon gave rise to an entirely new social situation: there emerged a class of industrial workers and the so-called “industrial proletariat”, whose dreadful living conditions Friedrich Engels described alarmingly in 1845. For his readers, the conclusion is clear: this cannot continue; a change is necessary.
As such change is hardly contrary to the Gospel. Certainly the sins of exploitation can be condemned by the measuring stick of Christian morality.
Yet the change would shake up and overturn the entire structure of bourgeois society. After the bourgeois revolution of 1789, the time had come for a new, proletarian revolution: progress could not simply continue in small, linear steps. A revolutionary leap was needed.
In other words, the hermeneutic of rupture. Regular readers here know I’m not a hanger-on for either the small steps or the leap. For many human beings, a life’s reform requires a complete break from the past. Addicts find this to be so, and Twelve-Step programs often cite the need for hitting bottom before the motivation for reform can take real root. In the spiritual life, sometimes a significant leap is a godly inspiration. St Paul on the road in Acts 9. Many other stories of saints, and even ordinary persons who give up a prior life to enter into marriage, priesthood, and vowed religious life.
Karl Marx took up the rallying call, and applied his incisive language and intellect to the task of launching this major new and, as he thought, definitive step in history towards salvation—towards what Kant had described as the “Kingdom of God”. Once the truth of the hereafter had been rejected, it would then be a question of establishing the truth of the here and now. The critique of Heaven is transformed into the critique of earth, the critique of theology into the critique of politics. Progress towards the better, towards the definitively good world, no longer comes simply from science but from politics—from a scientifically conceived politics that recognizes the structure of history and society and thus points out the road towards revolution, towards all-encompassing change.
I suppose a consideration of history finds that the overthrow of corrupt leaders often has an undercurrent of hope for a better life for the masses.
With great precision, albeit with a certain one-sided bias, Marx described the situation of his time, and with great analytical skill he spelled out the paths leading to revolution—and not only theoretically: by means of the Communist Party that came into being from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, he set it in motion. His promise, owing to the acuteness of his analysis and his clear indication of the means for radical change, was and still remains an endless source of fascination. Real revolution followed, in the most radical way in Russia.
Perhaps Russia as a locale was not surprising. The last czars held fast to a certain feudalism for their people. That, combined with international failures in war might have led to a top-to-bottom dissatisfaction with the royalty of the early 20th century. Certainly new leaders inherited a tragic disregard for the common folk. Maybe fake news and lies have softened the perception of hardship, but the undercurrent of dissatisfaction can’t be totally erased. People still yearn for hope, in this life, the next, or in whatever form they can find it.
This document is Copyright © 2007 – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. You can find the full document online here.
Catholic Sensibility 
Pingback: Ceylon-ananda.com