Towards a Catholic Marxism
I have a complicated relationship with Catholicism and Marxism. In my opinion, they are valuable moral frameworks which have been corrupted by the institutions that allege to implement them. The Catholic church has been marred by sexual abuse scandals in recent years while the twentieth century saw Stalin and Mao commit atrocities under the guise of Marxism. Nevertheless, these ostensibly incompatible ideologies remain key frameworks which have shaped my intellectual and moral formation. In this piece, I hope to offer a path towards a Catholic Marxism which privileges issues of social justice and concern for the poor and disenfranchised.
There have been attempts to weld the two ideologies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For instance, Gustavo Gutierrez and other proponents of liberation theology articulated a “preferential option for the poor.” They argued that scripture focuses on aiding the poor and powerless such as in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Moreover, in the 1981 encyclical Laborem exercens, Pope John Paul II incorporated Marx’s critique of capitalism by criticizing the exploitation of workers worldwide. In 2005, the Catholic church even opened cause of canonization of the African socialist and former president of Tanzania Julius Nyerere. To this day, he is afforded the title “Servant of God.”
Suffice to say, there is precedent for a general notion of Christian socialism. That being said, I contend that we must turn to the early work of structural Marxist Louis Althusser in order to ascertain a specific vision of Catholic Marxism. In his 1949 essay “A Matter of Fact,” Althusser argues that the Catholic church must accomplish two tasks to remain relevant: “social emancipation and the reconquest of religious life.” Simply put, Catholics must achieve both a collective and individual transformation in order to remain true to their religion in the twenty-first century. And although I didn’t wholly comprehend Althusser’s essay (or much of his work), these ideas are a helpful foundation for exploring how the contemporary church can embrace some of Marx’s critique of capitalism in order to remain true to its Catholic social teaching and Christ’s original vision.
Christ famously said that the meek will inherit the Earth and that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. In these social teachings, Christ clearly sides with the proletariat against the oppressive landowning class. Bourgeois Catholics who challenge female bodily autonomy and question the equal right to marriage would do well to revisit their own scripture. In it, they may find a religion that is not at odds but compatible with Marx’s ideas: a Catholic Marxism for our own troubled age.
