SEVENTY YEARS AFTER "DIVINI REDEMPTORIS"
 

Dear Friends and Benefactors of the Society in Ireland,       

            On April 1917, Vladimir Lenin arrives from Switzerland to Petrograd and takes the leadership of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Between May and October 1917, Our Lady appears to the three children of Fatima. She tells them: If my requests are granted, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, Russia will spread her errors throughout the world raising up wars and persecutions against the Church, the good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, and various nations will be annihilated. On 13 October 1917, the sun danced before a crowd of seventy thousand witnesses, while the three seers contemplated the greatest mariophany of history. Twelve days later, the Russian provisional government transferred the power to Lenin and his Bolsheviks, marking the beginning of the spread of Communism in the twentieth century. The Red Terror will follow, and an ocean of blood and tears will inundate the earth.

            Bolshevism may be dead today, but the principles of the Communist movement, the "errors of Russia" of which Our Lady of Fatima spoke, are very much alive, and in order to understand and detect them we must read what the Church has to say about them.

            It was seventy years ago, on 19 March 1937, that Pope Pius XI solemnly condemned Communism as "intrinsically perverse" in his Encyclical Divini Redemptoris.  As early as 1846, Pope Pius IX promulgated a similar condemnation, and in the Syllabus Errorum  he warned the faithful flock against that infamous doctrine of so-called Communism which is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the rights, property and possessions of all men, and even society itself. Also Pope Leo XIII in Quod Apostolici Muneris, 28 December 1878, defined Communism as the fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin. The popes are not referring to Bolshevism but to the Marxist principles of Communism. Some of you may be surprised to read what those principles are, and how the warning of Mother Mary is as valid today as it was in 1917.

            Pius XI makes it clear that the ultimate goal of Communism is to upset the social order as a means to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilization. Terror, class struggle, and absolute state control are the means to achieve that truly diabolical aim, and they are well known to us as the typical marks of a Communist regime. Yet the "errors of Russia" are not to be found in the strategy of Communism but in its perverse principles, and so the pope denounces them in a magisterial dissection of a monster in which we recognize many of the very errors afflicting the world today. Let us then see those principles of Communism, as diagnosed by Pius XI:

·         Materialism and Evolutionism: "According to this doctrine there is in the world only one reality, matter, the blind forces of which evolve into plant, animal and man. Even human society is nothing but a phenomenon and form of matter, evolving in the same way."

·         Atheism and denial of an afterlife: "There is no room for the idea of God; there is no difference between matter and spirit, between soul and body; there is neither survival of the soul after death nor any hope in a future life."

·         Absolute equality amongst men: "In man's relations with other individuals, besides, Communists hold the principle of absolute equality, rejecting all hierarchy and divinely-constituted authority, including the authority of parents. What men call authority and subordination is derived from the community as its first and only font."

·         Destruction of Christian marriage and family: "Refusing to human life any sacred or spiritual character, such a doctrine logically makes of marriage and the family a purely artificial and civil institution, the outcome of a specific economic system. There exists no matrimonial bond of a juridico-moral nature that is not subject to the whim of the individual or of the collectivity. Naturally, therefore, the notion of an indissoluble marriage-tie is scouted."

·         Total emancipation of women: "Communism is particularly characterized by the rejection of any link that binds woman to the family and the home, and her emancipation is proclaimed as a basic principle. She is withdrawn from the family and the care of her children, to be thrust instead into public life and collective production under the same conditions as man."

·         Right of education denied to the parents: "The right of education is denied to parents, for it is conceived as the exclusive prerogative of the community, in whose name and by whose mandate alone parents may exercise this right."

·         Denial of human dignity: "It subverts the social order, because it means the destruction of its foundations; because it ignores the true origin and purpose of the State; because it denies the rights, dignity and liberty of human personality."

            And after the principles, some of the methods to propagate the Communist errors:

·         World crisis: "The Communist takes advantage of the present world-wide economic crisis to draw into the sphere of his influence even those sections of the populace which on principle reject all forms of materialism and terrorism."

·         Exploitation of social and educational conditions: "The preachers of Communism are also proficient in using racial antagonisms and political divisions and oppositions. They take advantage of the lack of orientation characteristic of modern agnostic science in order to burrow into the universities, where they bolster up the principles of their doctrine with pseudo-scientific arguments."

·         Economic liberalism, profanation of the Sabbath: "If we would explain the blind acceptance of Communism by so many thousands of workmen, we must remember that the way had been already prepared for it by the religious and moral destitution in which wage-earners had been left by liberal economics. Even on Sundays and holy days, labor-shifts were given no time to attend to their essential religious duties."

·         Laicism: "Laicism has been actively and persistently promoted, with the result that we are now reaping the fruits of the errors so often denounced by Our Predecessors and by Ourselves. It can surprise no one that the Communistic fallacy should be spreading in a world already to a large extent de-Christianized."

·         Blind and apostate rulers: "It may be said in all truth that the Church, like Christ, goes through the centuries doing good to all. There would be today neither Socialism nor Communism if the rulers of the nations had not scorned the teachings and maternal warnings of the Church."

·         Global propaganda: "A propaganda so truly diabolical that the world has perhaps never witnessed its like before. It is directed from one common center. It is shrewdly adapted to the varying conditions of diverse peoples. It has at its disposal great financial resources, gigantic organizations, international congresses, and countless trained workers. It makes use of pamphlets and reviews, of cinema, theater and radio, of schools and even universities. Little by little it penetrates into all classes of the people and even reaches the better-minded groups of the community, with the result that few are aware of the poison which increasingly pervades their minds and hearts."

                The solution? The reign of Jesus and Mary in every heart and nation. The errors of Communism spread like fire because of the refusal of this Kingship by individuals and societies. On the bases of liberalism and laicism they wished to build other social edifices which, powerful and imposing as they seemed at first, all too soon revealed the weakness of their foundations, and today are crumbling one after another before our eyes, as everything must crumble that is not grounded on the one corner stone which is Christ Jesus. Up to us, my dear friends, to contribute in a humble manner to restore all things in Christ through Mary. We cannot change the world, but we can change our hearts and our families.

             May the graces of the Holy Week and of Eastertide strengthen, enlighten, and comfort us.

            With the Holy Family, in the month of St. Joseph, always yours truly,

 

                                                                                Father Ramón Anglés