Steve Greene – Catholic Answers
Polls showing that a majority of American millennials are sympathetic toward socialism have raised alarms or hopes, depending on whom you ask. But whatever the secular world thinks, Catholics cannot affirm this error. Marxism and socialism are fundamentally flawed not because their ideals are too lofty, but because they are based on a defective anthropology, or view of the human person.
There may be no person who understood the dreadful consequences of Marxist anthropology better than St. John Paul II. Raised in Poland under the successive tyrannies of German National Socialism (Nazism) and Russia’s communist empire, young Karol Wojytla saw up close the destructive power of terrible ideas. He lost Jewish childhood friends under Nazi occupation, and as a young seminarian helped lead a peaceful resistance to the Soviets by keeping Polish traditions alive through study and through an underground theater troupe.
… the reasons that socialist and communist regimes have always aggressively promoted atheism and the suppression of the Christian faith. Socialism is, in fact, the deification of the state, elevating the state above all other commitments and communities, and commanding absolute adherence to its mandates and priorities. For Marx and his proteges, all other human commitments and communities—to God, to spouse, to family, to Church—must be expunged from society to give priority to the all-powerful state. For the socialists each man is the property of the collectivist state.
Here again, St. John Paul saw with piercing clarity the threat that authentic Christian anthropology posed to the Marxist project. In the Catholic tradition the person, the family, and the faith are all communities and commitments that exist prior to the state, both chronologically and in the natural order of things. God created persons, and marriage and family as the natural means by which new persons come into existence and are loved and formed. The state, on the other hand, is a man-made construct, a temporary reality through which persons pass on their way to the life to come.
Illuminating the Catholic counternarrative to the socialist anthropology is just part of the living legacy of St. John Paul II. Throughout his ministry as a priest, bishop and pope, he proclaimed and defended the unique and unrepeatable dignity and worth of every human person, and he never forgot the horrors perpetrated by the socialists of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. As a young man, priest and bishop, Karol Wojtyla survived the terror of socialist occupation. As Pope, St. John Paul the Great fought the error of socialist anthropology with the truth, goodness and beauty of the Catholic faith.
Pope St. John Paul II, pray for us!
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