Socialists are wrong! Who says so? Apart from everyone who shills for the capitalist class, the pope, that’s who. In particular, pope Leo XIII. You may have missed his papal encyclical Rerum Novarum.
Well, it was over one hundred and thirty years ago.
Leo writes of a ‘great mistake’ embraced by the socialist-leaning labor movements, which is the notion that ‘class is naturally hostile to class’ and ‘wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict.’ This view, he asserts, is ‘so false … that the direct contrary is the truth.’ ‘It [is] ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic,’ Leo claims. ‘Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.’
By ‘nature’ did he mean the sky deity? Which one, Zeus, Ra, Varuna, Yahweh? Apologies to all of the sky deities who didn’t get a mention here but the list is too long to include them all. Early priests had discovered that propagating the myth that unpleasant fictional beings could be mean enough to ruin the lives of the populace unless sacrifices were made through wealth accruing to their self-styled intermediaries, the priest class. Popes continue to deceive the gullible in similar ways.
Leo must have spat out his wafer and choked on the altar wine when The Communist Manifesto came out in 1848. Pope of the day Pius IX wasted no time in composing a retort.
Pius’s 1849 Nostis et nobiscum calls socialism and communism an ‘iniquitous plot’ and ‘perverted teachings’: ‘The special goal of their proponents is to introduce to the people the pernicious fictions by misapplying the terms “liberty” and “equality.” The final goal teachings, whether of Communism or Socialism, is to excite by continuous disturbances workers and others, especially those of the lower class, whom they have deceived by their lies and deluded by the promise of a happier condition. They are preparing them for plundering, stealing, and usurping first the Church’s and then everyone’s property. After this they will profane all law, human and divine, to destroy divine worship and to subvert the entire ordering of civil societies.’
As Jimmy Cricket used to say, and there’s more. ‘The crafty enemies of the Church and human society attempt to seduce the people in many ways. One of their chief methods is the misuse of the new technique of book-production. They are wholly absorbed in the ceaseless daily publication and proliferation of impious pamphlets, newspapers and leaflets which are full of lies, calumnies and seduction.’ Keep the masses in ignorance! Guess Pius IX would have hated social media.
From 1560 to 1966 the Catholic Church had an Index of Forbidden Books, Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The sheep who allowed the church to regulate even their sex lives were forbidden to print or read publications from this list.
Other totalitarian regimes who thought likewise spring to mind.
DC
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