Let the Popes Finish Their Sentences
Surely I misread it.
Do you ever read something and you have that pause… that “wait a minute” pose? Your mind is prompting you that there’s something else not there. Suddenly you’re questioning yourself. You wonder if you misremember something, or maybe you need more coffee and didn’t understand it, so you go back and read it again thinking maybe you skimmed a little too fast.
I had a bit of that feeling when I read the National Catholic Register’s recent analysis, “Socialism Is Surging in America. What Does the Catholic Church Say?” … a serious piece, in a serious paper… and found I could not follow the argument to accept this new nice socialism. I assumed at once that the defect was in me. It turns out that half of the teaching and history was missing…
What exactly was the Church condemning
Socialism. The Register’s own article answers this, and answers it correctly, in its opening columns. Leo XIII in 1891 called socialism’s state-ownership of the means of production “emphatically unjust.” Pius XI in 1931: “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist” (Quadragesimo Anno, no. 120). John XXIII in 1961, in Mater et Magistra, taught that no Catholic could subscribe even to moderate socialism. And the Catechism of the Catholic Church, quietly (albeit too quietly, I think), at no. 2425: the Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with “communism” or “socialism.”
That last clause — “associated with” — is the crack the modern courtesy tries to widen. This is where I had to pause and take stock of my recollection. Out of charity and fair play, we tend to give room for good intentions, right? Fair enough. That seems to be the line in the article (unless I misread). But there’s something missing. We need to read what the same tradition of teaching on socialism had already said when the socialists tried this “play nice” routine early on. Pius XI did not wait for a new dictionary. He closed the nice path because he saw what was underneath this veneer of nice sounding things, that is, of the goods advanced by Socialists.
All of this nice veneer appears in the article reportedly coming from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) but it is discussed as a new breed of socialism, worth reconsidering and so on. That is the part my slow mind cannot cross. It looks to me as if today is no different that what the Popes had described. I had thought the point of a Magisterial teaching was that it stays where you left it. It’s immutable.
I can hear the late Professor Charles E. Rice, chairman emeritus of this Forum, in the margin. He taught me jurisprudence. He would have docked me for leaving half the quote on the desk.
The “But today the word means something different” move the oldest trick in the Socialist Playbook
I can remember that even in grade school, eighth grade to be precise, I had a teacher who was fixated on the idea of verbal engineering. I heard it more in high school as well. Communists love to use verbal engineering, and all it meant was that the moment people grasped the con game afoot, the commies would change the name of whatever it was. I’d roll my eyes or go back to doodling because I wasn’t interested in that, apart from the idea of engineering words, that is. I went back to doodling. I should have taken notes.
I guess I never realized as a child that Pius XI warned of this verbal engineering and made it part of the prohibition on socialism, in the very same paragraph quoted above and in the Register article, immediately before.
If Socialism, like all errors, contains some truth (which, moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. — Quadragesimo Anno, no. 120
So Pius is admitting that some of the things socialists want may well be true. Socialists themselves needed again to make themselves less detectable to the average Catholic, so they made themselves look kinder. (No more blowing up cities or conducting riots — at least for the time being.)
Some socialists, he noted, had softened: they disavowed violence, they tempered the class struggle, they tolerated private property. Devout Catholics wrote to Rome asking whether this milder socialism might now at last be baptized. Hear how he answers:
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. — Quadragesimo Anno, no. 117
The test, he says, is not the sweetness of the platform, the kindness of its words. Rather, the test is the concept of society underneath it. Socialists will make nice in order to gain progress, but wise old Pius puts it right there that a leopard cannot change its spots.
Six years later, in the encyclical on atheistic communism, he described, with what I can only call precision, the very premise and tactic whereby socialists try to win over the masses through sympathy:
The majority succumb to its deception, skillfully concealed by the most extravagant promises. By pretending to desire only the betterment of the condition of the working classes, by urging the removal of the very real abuses chargeable to the liberalistic economic order, and by demanding a more equitable distribution of this world’s goods (objectives entirely and undoubtedly legitimate), the Communist takes advantage of the present world-wide economic crisis… And as every error contains its element of truth, the partial truths… are astutely presented according to the needs of time and place, to conceal, when convenient, the repulsive crudity and inhumanity of Communistic principles and tactics. Thus the Communist ideal wins over many of the better minded members of the community. These in turn become the apostles of the movement among the younger intelligentsia who are still too immature to recognize the intrinsic errors of the system. — Divini Redemptoris, no. 15
Read that again. That’s particularly tough for what is happening in America today. Notice what Pius XI does first: he concedes the goods. Categorically. In parentheses. “Entirely and undoubtedly legitimate.” The 1931 and 1937 texts grant the sympathetic framing in full, and then name the framing’s function — concealment and deception, deployed by men of good will, age-appropriately targeted. This is what I cannot get past. The Register article presents the nuance as a new breed. Pope Pius warned us they do this as a tactic of gain to slip past detection.
So if the past is repeating itself as when the Pope condemned it, then we’ll see the trap repeat and Catholics will again not see the leopard and tell us: that democratic socialism, in some respects, has been close to Catholic social doctrine in forming a social consciousness. Closeness to a conscience is not baptism of the concept of society. Pius XI said the concept itself was irreconcilable. He said it after the platform had already learned to speak softly and purr so smoothly.
I made a list, and the list worried me.
Because I keep my dates in a shoebox and not in my head, I took a while to write down every time the Church has addressed socialism by name. I was looking for the hinge — the place where the line bends, where some pope or council reviewed the condemnations and found them too hard for kinder times. I could not find the hinge. Here is the list:
1832. Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, condemns the indifferentism and liberalism that will father the thing.
1846. Pius IX, in his first encyclical, Qui Pluribus, already names and condemns communism — barely a generation after the first manifestos, long before Lenin.
1864. Pius IX, Quanta Cura, with the Syllabus attached. The Syllabus does not trouble to explain itself. One of its numbered sections stands there in plain print, headed simply: Socialism, Communism, Secret Societies.
1878. Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris, names “that sect of men who, under almost barbarous names, are called socialists, communists, and nihilists,” now marching openly in the light of day toward the overthrow of civil society. Then Rerum Novarum, 1891: state suppression of private ownership “emphatically unjust” — and, in the same encyclical, the duties of the rich toward the poor, stated with equal plainness. Both halves, always both halves.
1931. Pius XI closes the soft path. 1937. He dissects the hard one: Divini Redemptoris, known by its English title, Atheistic Communism.
1961. John XXIII closes the moderate branch: not even moderate socialism.
1965. The Second Vatican Council, in its most world-embracing hour, still names collectivist systems among the distortions of the human person (Gaudium et Spes, nos. 20–21, on atheism).
1991. John Paul II, in the very year the walls came down, softens not one syllable: the failure was of the concept, not merely the execution (Centesimus Annus, no. 13).
1992. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2425.
A hundred and sixty years. And the line runs deeper than the list. When Bellarmine took up his pen against the Münster Communards — the Anabaptists who would abolish private dominion and hold all things in community by divine fiat — he was answering the same argument, against the same concept, with only one difference: they cited Scripture badly instead of history. There wasn’t a Marx yet, so they couldn’t quote him. But even that early, the skeleton beneath this creature is always the same skeleton, the spots of the leopard the same. Each century only drapes fresh flesh over it — liberalism’s flesh, Marx’s flesh, this year’s flesh, democratic and kindly and warm. The flesh changes. The analysis’s conclusion is the same.
I keep the list on the kitchen table in pencil, and the reason is simple: there is a test that answers, in advance, every honest-sounding plea that socialism today is only generous warmth organized better. The condemned object was never the warmth. It was the collectivity — the idea that society is prior to the person, and that the state may supply what only charity can supply. The list says so. Every document on the list says so. Both halves, always both halves. The essence is that this creature wants to invert God’s plan for people in society.
Does the DSA not mean what it says?
The Register article leans on a kindly Notre Dame professor and parses the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The professor suggests that the platform really means Scandinavian social democracy after all. And by this new term would therefore be different from old school socialism. Generous of him. Forgive a man who prefers the DSA movement’s own words:
Our enemies are not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital… We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic… Some of these demands may be won under our current system, but we know complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up. We push these demands to their furthest extent today, so we can fight for their fullest realization in a socialist future. — Workers Deserve More, 2026
A classless society, the same program dreams — no debt, no landlord. Abolition of the Senate. A judiciary subordinate to a one-house legislature. Public ownership of essential industries. When the Registercanvasses the platform’s abortion-on-demand and redefinition-of-marriage positions, its scholars concede all of it, and one of them adds, nobly, that “you don’t need to be a socialist to desire those things” — which I would have thought was the whole article walking away from its own headline. So they’ve done what Pius detected: given some sympathetic bait to hide the spots.
And when the piece asks what the bishops will actually do about it, the answer is roughly: nothing; bishops avoid naming movements. Young people, we are told, are not marrying, not having children, not at work, and so they ask who is going to take care of them, and they turn to the state. That last observation is true as far as it goes. It is not a hinge in the teaching. It is a diagnosis. The skeleton of this new creature is the same old same old.
What did Father Hardon say?
The Register’s frame is that young people ask “who is going to take care of me?” and turn to the state. True, as far as it goes. But Fr. Hardon dealt with this same question and answered it twice, because he always answered it twice. Fr. Hardon liked to etch this direct line of the State to the Individual in his comments. Take this one: “Socialism: how the state controls the lives of the people. Karl Marx introduced the income tax into the modern world. And you better pay your income tax. The option is [pay up or] jail. Believe me, Moscow has nothing on Detroit.” It is his standing line; it recurs, deadpan, across many separate retreat series, like a refrain he refused to retire.
He had an ear for the naming game before almost anyone. He watched the Italian Communist Party rechristen itself the Democratic Party of the Left, and left a rule I keep thinking got misplaced: “Always check your silverware when people are talking too much about democracy in a vague way.”
Fr. Hardon saw socialism as a marketable version of communism. In the end he would make it very clear: socialism, he said, “is just another name for communism.”
And the promise — surely the promise was the actual matter. He made his students memorize it from Pius XI: “Communism is utopian messianism.” And his own gloss, which I have been carrying around like a stone in my shoe: the messianic kingdom “in which the Messiah would not promise happiness and life to come but all the worldly satisfactions that we want here on earth. Hence: utopia.” Naturally, the iron rod of totalinarism is kept far away from mention of the utopian dreams promised. (they bury it in the fine print)
Put Quadragesimo Anno, no. 117, and Divini Redemptoris, no. 15, beside the column and you have my whole difficulty in two documents from two years that matter: the goods utilized by socialists to agitate were conceded by popes long ago, this strategy was named by popes before social media and the kinder times we live in today. If the popes are correct, then they nailed it that a leopard cannot change its spots. We find their analysis to be true, because buried in the article you find the admission: the DSA’s own leaders say their goal is communism.
I want to be careful here, because the Church does not deny things that are true. Rather, when she denies them, she operates as a surgeon lances — concession first, precise, in print: Pius XI’s parentheses, “objectives entirely and undoubtedly legitimate.” The betterment of the worker, the fair wage, the equitable distribution of goods — the Church has never disputed a syllable of those. He is not throwing the baby out with the bath water. He even granted that men who work for such ends “have no reason to become socialists” — the offer they accept is already in the Church’s pocket (cf. Quadragesimo Anno, no. 115).
The hungry, Hardon said, will follow the demagogue who promises them plenty at the expense of the rich — and then he said what they would actually be following: “Communism is what Christianity should have been, built on hatred as it is. It has lost its love in large measure because those wealthy Catholics who have much have refused to share.”
Read that against the closing melancholy of the article — the atomized generation, the orphan at the door of the state. The question is posed sagely; the answer was given half a century earlier, and it names the culpable first: the rich who will not share. Before any new campaign is made to clamor on the failure to love, the failure to love should be confessed. On Fr. Hardon’s map, democratic socialism is not a third concern. It is stage one, top priority, with better publicists.
The innocent summary, for a slow horse like me
That some things socialism asks are good: the popes said it clearly all the way down the list. That socialism remains what it is, the goods notwithstanding: Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, no. 117, answered this exact question long before I was born. That socialism’s method is illusory promises’s on half-truths catered to the opportune, and its recruiting ground targets the young and lonely: Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, no. 15, which might have been drafted against last week’s news, last decade’s movement, or tomorrow’s surprise. It is dead on accurate and immutable. We are warned (very clearly) that socialism’s illusory promise itself is the snare — worldly satisfaction here on earth, hence utopia. And that the answer to the melancholy is not a kinder state but restored households, parishes, workshops, and confessionals — with the wealthy (even the Catholic ones) standing in the first row at the food pantry, penitential and open-handed at last. Charity travels through somebody. Never through everything nor by force. Particularly not the State. And never by the State’s force.
One last thing. I went through the whole ledger — Bellarmine, Gregory, Pius, Leo, Pius again, John, the Council, John Paul again, the Catechism — looking for the one document, the one address, the one footnote that softened the condemned concept itself. It isn’t there. Ninety-five years, a hundred and sixty, two hundred, forward and backward through the registers, and the sentence never changed. It is a fact I state plainly, because it seems simply true: this question was never left open. This leopard that seeks to force charity through the power of the State is unchanged throughout and they tell us so clearly over and over again. So I ask only what I asked at the start: let the popes finish their sentences.
This article, Let the Popes Finish Their Sentences is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/let-the-popes-finish-their-sentences/
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