Socialism, Si; Küng, No

Political and religious illusions die hard. When Pope John XXIII opened the Vatican to the pollution of modernist thought, those “in the know” said it was an old man’s whim; during Pope Paul VI’s “October Revolution” (theologian Yves Congar’s term) Catholics put it down as an aberration of a “Maritain leftist.” What, then, do they say about the present Pope, who carries forward the revolutionary reforms of his predecessors? Can anybody claim that what we have been witnessing, for more than two decades, is not the unrolling of official Vatican policy?

What I propose to explain are the political, not the doctrinal, changes of the last quarter-century. I suggest that starting with the Second Vatican Council, and continuing through the pronouncement of the encyclical Laborem Exercens and on, the Catholic Church has dropped its alliance with liberal bourgeois capitalism and has been forging new ties with socialism. And socialism, in turn—which covers everything from Mitterrand’s France to one-party Mexico, from Solidarity to Papandreou’s Greece—has been slowly disentangling itself from the Marxists’ clutches and becoming an acceptable (because tamed) partner in the dialogue with the Church.

TM

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Thomas Molnar

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Political and religious illusions die hard. When Pope John XXIII opened the Vatican to the pollution of modernist thought, those “in the know” said it was an old man’s whim; during Pope Paul VI’s “October Revolution” (theologian Yves Congar’s term) Catholics put it down as an aberration of a “Maritain leftist.” What, then, do they say about the present Pope, who carries forward the revolutionary reforms of his predecessors? Can anybody claim that what we have been witnessing, for more than two decades, is not the unrolling of official Vatican policy?

What I propose to explain are the political, not the doctrinal, changes of the last quarter-century. I suggest that starting with the Second Vatican Council, and continuing through the pronouncement of the encyclical Laborem Exercens and on, the Catholic Church has dropped its alliance with liberal bourgeois capitalism and has been forging new ties with socialism. And socialism, in turn—which covers everything from Mitterrand’s France to one-party Mexico, from Solidarity to Papandreou’s Greece—has been slowly disentangling itself from the Marxists’ clutches and becoming an acceptable (because tamed) partner in the dialogue with the Church.