From Modernism to Communism. By Maestro Aurelio Porfiri
The Magisterium has taught us that communism and Catholicism are incompatible, yet how many Catholics have contributed to the obvious shift to the left of Catholic culture that has been so evident in recent years? We are well aware of the “Christians for Socialism” and other similar movements that have attempted a synthesis that, despite the good intentions of some, has always failed.
Pius IX in his 1846 Encyclical Qui Pluribus (two years before the Communist Manifesto!) already clearly warned: "This is the aim of the nefarious doctrine of Communism, as they say, most adverse to natural law itself: once it is accepted, the rights of all, things, property, indeed human society itself, will be upset from the bottom up. This is the aim of the dark snares of those who, in the guise of lambs, but with the spirit of wolves, sneak in under false pretences of purer compassion and stricter virtue and discipline: they gently surprise, they softly seize, they secretly kill; they turn men away from the observance of all religion, and make havoc of the Lord's flock."
All successive Popes, until recent years, have warned of this danger, such as Pius XI in 1937 in Divini Redemptoris: "Take care, Venerable Brothers, that the faithful do not allow themselves to be deceived! Communism is intrinsically perverse and collaboration with it by anyone who wants to save Christian civilisation cannot be accepted in any field. And if some who are misled cooperate in the victory of Communism in their country, they will fall first as victims of their error, and the more the regions where Communism manages to penetrate are distinguished by the antiquity and greatness of their Christian civilization, the more devastating will be the hatred of the ‘godless’.”
Yet, there has been a failure to understand that Christianity and communism are incompatible, since communism is an earthly form of messianism which, even in its more liberal and democratic forms, clearly opposes societies that want to be based on Christian values by means of goodism and political correctness. These are new heresies that threaten the natural order of our civilisation.
How could communism penetrate the Church? "Christianity was born communist, and communism was born Christian. It is a question, of course, of understanding the meaning of the word Christianity as well as the meaning of the word communism" (The Church and Communism).
Ernesto Buonaiuti said this already in the 1940s. Buonaiuti was one of the standard bearers of Catholic modernism, who through the idea that the Church must meet the modern world (and not evangelise and transform it) contributed to the spread of the infection.
Buonaiuti himself stated in the early years of the 20th century: "Many young priests proclaim, not so loudly as to be punished by the Vatican, but sufficiently to understand each other, their outspoken sympathy for the socialist party"(Lettere di un prete modernista).
In The Church and Communism, he writes how in large strata of the Society of Jesus, once a bastion of Catholic doctrine, the modernist germ had penetrated deeply in its multiple manifestations: "We have witnessed the appearance of a communism that is not only not atheistic, but energetically and deliberately professes to be Catholic. Already in the period of the Nazi occupation, this Catholic communist party had its representatives. One day, the underground chronicle of Rome learned that several young men who claimed to be Catholic Communists had been arrested and that they regularly gathered in the old Caravita Oratory, near St Ignatius, under the spiritual guidance of the Jesuit Fathers.”
The antidote to one poison is not another poison. Communism must be atheistic because it is based on Marxism and historical materialism.
Often faith is reduced to ethics, to behaving like good citizens while the supernatural element is eliminated altogether. And yet, I repeat, many who call themselves Catholics continue to run after the red mirage.
Modernism too opened the door to sweeping away anyone who opposes the destructive fury of false progress.
