In Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Pope Pius XI reflected on the debate between capitalist and socialist economic systems. Like his predecessor, Leo XIII, Pius had strong words for capitalists who hoarded wealth and treated workers as dispensable commodities on par with machines or sacks of coal. But he also said that capitalism “is not to be condemned in itself. And surely it is not of its own nature vicious” (101).
Pius went on to say that “when it comes to the present [capitalist] economic system, we have found it laboring under the gravest of evils.” But whereas these evils could be remedied, the same was not true for socialism.
Regarding this latter system, Pius bluntly declared, “We have also summoned communism and socialism again to judgment and have found all their forms, even the most modified, to wander far from the precepts of the gospel” (128).
Jose Mena, one of the authors of the socialist Tradinista! manifesto, claims, “The Church’s condemnations of socialism tend to focus on other facets of left-wing political tradition: its thoroughgoing materialism and atheism, its hatred for God and for the natural family, and its totalitarian historical aspect.” He insists that the Catholic tradition still allows for a moderate socialism that orders private property to the common good through governmental oversight.
Yet is it a coincidence that the major socialist states throughout history have always been atheistic or suppressed religious freedom? Vladimir Lenin said, “Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organization, as instruments of bourgeois re action that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.”
In order to complete their revolt against the upper class, the communists’ allies in religion had to be done away with as well. In 1922, the Soviet Union murdered twenty-eight Eastern Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests (28). A friend of Sergius I, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, grimly recalled, “We [were like] chickens in a shed, from which the cook snatches out her victim in turn” (83). The much smaller Catholic Church fared no better, as by 1926 there were no Catholic bishops left in the country, and by 1941, there were only two Catholic churches (289).
Pius XI was aware of a socialism that “not only professes the rejection of violence but modifies and tempers to some degree, if it does not reject entirely, the class struggle and the abolition of private ownership” (Quadragesimo Anno 112). He commended the “just demands” of these socialists (such as stronger unions and worker protections) but said their advocacy is unnecessary because there is “nothing in them now which is inconsistent with Christian truth, and much less are they special to socialism. Those who work solely toward such ends have, therefore, no reason to become socialists” (115).
Pius then spelled out the matter to Christians waiting “in suspense” to see if Christianity and socialism could ever be compatible with each other:
We make this pronouncement: Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, socialism, if it remains truly socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth (117).
Even if it doesn’t reject the existence of God, or send dissenters to the gulags (forced labor camps), or terrorize the population with secret police, true socialism is not compatible with Christianity. One reason is that socialism rejects the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. This is the belief that a central authority should subside or “sit back,” intervening only when lower, local authorities cannot address a problem. Pius formulated this principle, which “cannot be set aside or changed,” this way:
Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do (79).
Although this principle wasn’t formally articulated until the twentieth century, its precedents go all the way back to the Bible.
In the Old Testament, Moses’ father-in-law Jethro warned him against using his leadership office to hear every dispute among the Israelites. “The thing is too heavy for you,” he told Moses, and “you are not able to perform it alone” (Exod. 18:18). Jethro then gave Moses this advice: “Choose able men from all the people, such as fear God, men who are trustworthy and who hate a bribe; and place such men over the people as rulers of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens” (v. 21). In the New Testament, the apostles came to a similar conclusion when they felt overwhelmed by problems in local communities, and so they selected deacons to serve the people’s needs (Acts 6:1-7).
Even Brianne Jacobs, in her defense of democratic socialism, admits that “[Catholic social teaching] has a clear warning about socialism” that is “related to the principle of subsidiarity, which states that individuals’ needs should be met by local government or civil society whenever that is feasible.”
A big problem for socialism, be it radical or moderate, is that it says local authorities can’t routinely provide for their own welfare ,and so a central authority (like the federal government) must do it for them. This rejection of subsidiarity is especially evident in socialism’s scorn for the most fundamental local unit of authority in society: the family.
In 1930, Pius XI wrote an encyclical on Christian marriage and the family called Casti Connubii, which upheld the Church’s teaching on contraception when many people were justifying it in light of the Great Depression. But he also spoke of another sin against the family that seemed appealing to the economically disadvantaged: Communism.
He gives as one example “the daily increasing corruption of morals and the unheard of degradation of the family in those lands where communism reigns unchecked.” He repudiated the modern acceptance of divorce and warned how the destruction of the family leads to the destruction of the state, because the family is the foundation of the state.
But for socialists, a collective state could not exist without the destruction of the family. Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s co-author of The Communist Manifesto, argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State that families bound together in matrimony were a modern invention created for the purpose of consolidating wealth. Wealth could be redistributed, then, only once the family unit was broken apart and dissolved into society. The early Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky said, “The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’” and replace it with a “complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society.” This absorption included the indoctrination of children in government schools, or as Pope Pius XI described it:
There is a country where the children are actually being torn from the bosom of the family, to be formed (or, to speak more accurately, to be deformed and depraved) in godless schools and associations, to irreligion and hatred, according to the theories of advanced socialism; and thus is renewed in a real and more terrible manner the slaughter of the Innocents (Divini Illius Magistri 73).
Another early Soviet revolutionary, Alexandra Kollontai, said marriage would soon no longer be needed because, through “the collectivism of spirit,” as she calls it, “the ‘cold of inner loneliness’ from which people in bourgeois culture have attempted to escape through love and marriage will disappear” (154).
It’s no wonder that Pope Leo XIII denounced those who “think that the inherent character of marriage can be perverted with impunity . . . disregarding the sanctity of religion and of the sacrament.” He warned that both private families and public society risked being “miserably driven into that general confusion and overthrow of order which is even now the wicked aim of socialists and communists” (Arcanum Divinae 32).
This assault on the family is not a bygone relic of Soviet Communism. It still appears in modern works based on Marx’s philosophy—particularly those that connect economic inequities with perceived cultural ones.
But the family as instituted by God is not an egalitarian institution—the father has a different role from the son, and the daughter-in-law from the mother-in-law. The family is the classic example of unity arising from complementarity. Since communism wants none of that natural difference to play itself out in society, it must stamp out the family as the “cell” of society and as the first “school” of complementarity.
Although moderate socialism should be lauded for its rejection of class warfare, Pius XI points out that it still ends up either redundantly adopting the same ideals of Christian social teaching, or else it “sinks into communism.” If it does that, then it is beyond any hope of salvaging because, as the pope wrote in Divini Redemptoris, “communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever” (58).
But that’s not all—there’s much more in Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? Buy a copy here for the full story.