The Church And Marxism

The Church and Marxism Dr K R Bolton (Academy of Social and Political Research) The article by Prof. George Sans reappraising Karl Marx as a still very relevant philosopher of capitalist critique presumably reflects the position of the Vatican, given that the article appeared originally in the La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit journal which is vetted in advance by the Vatican Secretariat of State1, then reprinted in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper giving the article “added papal endorsement.”2 The article by Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, has quickly travelled through the world media. The news media carrying headlines such as “Vatican thumbs up for Karl Marx” as printed by The Times has provided the world with a clear message: Marx has been rehabilitated by the Vatican, and that therefore is nothing about Marx and his philosophy per se that are intrinsically anti-Catholic or anti-Christian. Marx has we are led to believe provided a valid and worthy critique of what Sans calls in Marxist terminology “social alienation” and the increasing disparity in incomes and wealth accumulation. According to the media reports: “L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said yesterday that Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making.”3 Sans is reported as stated further that, “Marx’s work remained especially relevant today as mankind was seeking ‘a new harmony’ between its needs and the natural environment. He also said that Marx’s theories may help to explain the enduring issue of income inequality within capitalist societies.” “We have to ask ourselves, with Marx, whether the forms of alienation of which he spoke have their origin in the capitalist system,” Professor Sans wrote. “If money as such does not multiply on its own, how are we to explain the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few?”4 At a time when people in general have believed that communism has finally crumbled and the atheistic, materialist dogmas of Marxism of whatever kind stand in disrepute, Sans has emerged from the Vatican media and academia to give it new relevance. Of course, for those better informed, Marxism is alive and well in the West, and always has been, where it has metamorphosed into Political Correctness, and owes its origins to the well-funded New School of Social Research in the USA which emerged from 1

Richard Owen, “Vatican thumbs up for Karl Marx after Galileo, Darwin and Oscar Wilde”, The Times Online, October 22, 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6884704.ece (accessed October 23, 2009). 2 Ibid. 3 ,Ibid. 4 Ibid.

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the Frankfurt School early last century, and became part of mainstream Western social science.5 The USSR having largely jettisoned Marxism other than for overseas propaganda purposes and as a weapon of foreign policy since the time Stalin deposed Trotsky, the impetus for Marxism has always come from the USA, where Trotskyists and other anti-Stalin Leftists found a cordial reception during the Cold War.6 The Slavic peoples are virtually immune from Marxism, in no small part thanks to the persistence of their spiritual heritage.7 The West, in a cultural, religious and spiritual malaise for the past several centuries – arguably since the Reformation, or at least since the French Revolution8 – has clung to the vestiges of whatever remains that is good and true to its soul and to its ethos, due in significant measure to the existence of the Church: a fact regardless of one’s personal religious affiliation, or lack thereof. Now comes Prof. Sans, with what the mass of ordinary folk throughout the world, Catholic and non-Catholic, can only assume to be Vatican endorsement, saying that Marxism offers a relevant critique of current social and economic ills, that Marx and Marxism are not at fault with the application of the dogma, but that it is the result of being misappropriated and misapplied by communists. The argument itself is classic Marxist dialectic. Trotskyists accuse Stalinists of having “betrayed the revolution.” Maoist China called the USSR “revisionist”. Communism splits into a myriad of sects and factionalises to the point of comedy. Obscure Trotskyist grouplets compromising a few dozen members at most split into rival factions due to some dispute over an obscure ideological point. They all say that one another have misappropriated and abused classical Marxism. Now Prof. Sans, from a supposedly Catholic perspective comes out with the same rationale, in order to obscure the flaws and crimes that inherently derive from Marxism as an ideology, manifested in the outright hellish sadism of applied Marxism. Sans states that the world still has a lot that is important to learn from Marx, a sincere but misunderstood soul. Continues The Times report: “Professor Sans argues that Marx’s intellectual legacy was marred by the misappropriation of his work by the communist regimes of the 20th century. “It 5

For the Soviet origins of political correctness see: Dr Frank Ellis, Political Correctness and the Theological Struggle (Auckland, New Zealand: Maxim Institute, 2004). On the implanting of Marxian ideology into the Western academic mainstream from the Frankfurt School see: Patrick J Buchanan, The Death of the West (New York: Thomas Dunne Press, 2002), pp. 73-96. 6 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999). Saunders documents how Trotskyists and other Leftists, including such luminaries as Bertrand Russell, were recruited by the CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and how other forms of what became Political Correctness, such as feminism, had their origins therein. 7 A religiosity and tradition which has survived no thanks to the efforts of globalist speculator George Soros’ world-wide foundations and fronts which have flooded the former Soviet bloc with propaganda, advisers, subversives and agitators to destroy the traditional foundations of these peoples, attempting to introduce them to the Western delights of feminism, abortion and marijuana, and all other such features of what he calls the “open society”. 8 K R Bolton, The Faith of Europe (Paraparaumu Beach, New Zealand: Spectrum Press, 2009).

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is no exaggeration to say that nothing has damaged the interests of Marx the philosopher more than Marxism,” he said.” “This overturns a century of Catholic hostility to his creed. Two years ago Benedict XVI singled out Marxism as one of the great scourges of the modern age. “The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit,” he told an audience in Brazil.”9 It is the traditional Catholic appraisal of Marxism that continues to be relevant, and the comments of Pope Benedict XVI in Brazil about Marxism having a sad legacy including “a painful destruction of the human spirit”, contain the deep philosophical insights that have been the basis of Catholic opposition not only to Marxism, but to capitalism, which the Papacy from the beginning of both systems, correctly regarded as mirror images of the same materialistic and hellish zeitgeist. The Church continues to beatify those martyred by the Red Terror during the Spanish Civil War, a product of Marxism of a variety of types: Trotskyist, Stalinist and social democratic, the latter of which (typically of Masonic inspiration) were the handmaiden of the communist terrorists who burned churches, exhumed the corpses of nuns for public display, and killed priests and monks.10 The Church philosophers, not too long ago, addressed the ideology of communism by means of thorough analyses of its innate and fundamental errors, which have made the sadistic application of Marx’s theories inevitable, in sharp contrast to the present-day academics in the Church such as Prof. Sans, who now state that Marx is a relevant, misunderstood idealist.11 The Church need not go anywhere beyond its own for a complete critique, and more importantly a complete alternative, to both Marxism and what the Church has always understood to be the injustices inherent in capitalism. Pope Pius XII, anticipating precisely the attitudes of the type expounded by Prof. Sans, writing of the danger evolutionism as a prelude to “dialectical materialism” (Marxism) stated: “9. Now Catholic theologians and philosophers, whose grave duty it is to defend natural and supernatural truth and instil it in the hearts of men, cannot afford to ignore or neglect these more or less erroneous opinions. Rather they must come to understand these same theories well, both because diseases are not properly treated unless they are rightly diagnosed, and because sometimes even in these false theories a certain amount of truth is contained, and, finally,

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Richard Owen, op.cit. See later in essay. 11 An example of a thorough philosophical appraisal of Marxism from a Catholic scholarly perspective is: Dr Charles J McFadden, The Philosophy of Communism (New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1939). Dr Fulton J Sheen, Catholic University of America, wrote the Preface. Based on McFadden’s Ph.D. thesis, the 300 page book includes chapters on the history of Marxism, the Marxist philosophy of nature, the mind, history, the state, religion, morality, revolution and society; followed by a second part that provides a critique of each. Hence the Catholic was well armed with a thorough refutation of Marxist ideology at a time, it might be added, when the Administration of President Roosevelt and the US intelligentsia, were sympathetic to Marxism and the USSR. 10

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because these theories provoke more subtle discussion and evaluation of philosophical and theological truths.”12 Precisely as Pius XII warned, Prof. Sans et al have focused on “a certain amount of truth [that] is contained…” in the false theories. But instead of ‘properly diagnosing and treating the disease’, Church ‘theologians and philosophers’ have failed in their responsibility and the Church seems to have long since repudiated the ‘social doctrine’ that provided a real alternative to Marxism and capitalism; a ‘social doctrine’ moreover that provided not only an analysis but a cure for the ills spoken of by Prof. Sans. Rather, over the past few decades theologians have been more inclined to promote a ‘social gospel’ or ‘liberation theology’ that seems little different from liberalism or Marxism. Prof. Sans, and all other Church theologians and philosophers, laymen, and priests who teach the ‘social gospel’ need go no further than the encyclical of Leo XIII who laid the basis for Catholic Social Doctrine as a direct response to the injustices of capitalism and the hellish pseudo-alternative of Marxism. Leo warned: “2. …It is no easy matter to define the relative rights and mutual duties of the rich and of the poor, of capital and of labour. And the danger lies in this, that crafty agitators are intent on making use of these differences of opinion to pervert men's judgments and to stir up the people to revolt.”13 So are we to believe that Prof. Sans and sundry other Churchmen who now state that Marx not only was but continues to be a legitimate and valuable social and economic analyst are stating the correct position of the Church, while Leo XIII and those subsequent to him until the recent triumph of modernism, are wrong? It is surely Marx and others of his ilk whom Leo was describing as ‘crafty agitators perverting men’s judgements to stir up revolt.’ Leo described precisely the historical processes that had brought the newly emerging industrial workers to their sorry state, along with the concentration of wealth that was even then evidence and to which Prof. Sans et al now address themselves by quoting Marx as some new and exciting prophet. Leo stated that the traditional social and economic order of guilds had been destroyed and that usury, regarded as sin by the Church, had become a basis of the economic system. He addressed matters on which Marxism is generally silent. Prof. Sans et al might profit by becoming familiar with those alternatives that stemmed from or were given impetus by Leo XIII’s encyclical. What they might discern, and what Leo XIII reiterated in 1891 – as the Church had declared for centuries – is that the foundation of economic injustice and dislocation is usury 14– or what we might today call the debt finance system. Yet we can go back further, prior to even the foundation of the Church herself, to find the key to understanding not only the reasons for the economic woes that Prof. Sans seeks for in Marxism, but the key to understanding much of history, namely I Timothy 6: 9-10. In a 12

Pius XII, Humani Generis, St. Peter's, Rome, August 12, 1950. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum: Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour, St. Peter’s May 15, 1891. 14 Example: Pope Benedict XIV, On Usury and Dishonest Profit, November 1, 1745: “One cannot condone the sin of usury”. 13

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couple of passages is all the economic wisdom that is required to understand the workings of the economic system. Leo described the system emerging during his own time, which might indeed be traced back to the Reformation:15 “3. In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”16 Leo in rejecting the demand of socialism to abolish private property in favour of communistic ownership under the State, proposed instead that everyone through their own labour is entitled to their own property: “15. …Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.” Leo described the duty of the State in terms that some would call the organic state or the corporatist state, namely that the State is what might be called the ‘brain’ of the social body, and each individual, family and class an organ whose health is necessary to the functioning of the whole social body. Thus, Leo describe it: “33. To cite the wise words of St. Thomas Aquinas: "As the part and the whole are in a certain sense identical, so that which belongs to the whole in a sense belongs to the part." Among the many and grave duties of rulers who would do their best for the people, the first and chief is to act with strict justice 15

William Cobbett, The History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, showing how that event has impoverished the main body of the people in those countries in a series of letters addressed to all sensible and just Englishmen (Kensington, 1824). The book is online at: http://www.wattpad.com/171334-History-of-the-protestant-Reformation-by-WilliamCobbett 16 Leo XIII, op.cit.

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with that justice which is called distributive - toward each and every class alike.” It will be noted that Leo uses the word distributive, and indeed in a practical sense it was Leo’s encyclical which gave birth to a number of movements that were to gain mass followings during the Great Depression thirty years later, one of the main movements in England being called Distributism, which included among its most avid advocates G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc17. This movement as the name suggests offered as the alternative to capitalism and Marxism, both of which result in concentration of wealth, whether by the state or by monopolies, that private property rather than being abolished, be spread widely. Social Credit, a movement founded by C H Douglas, advocating a banking system that repudiates usury, also gained impetus from Catholic support, and the longest enduring and most zealous of Social Credit movements in the world today remains a specifically Catholic lay institution, the Pilgrims of St Michael situated in Canada18. As in the pre-Reformation social system, the guilds, by Leo’s time known as trades unions, would be the basis of a just social order again: “49. The most important of all are workingmen's unions, for these virtually include all the rest. History attests what excellent results were brought about by the artificers' guilds of olden times. They were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art, as numerous monuments remain to bear witness. Such unions should be suited to the requirements of this our age - an age of wider education, of different habits, and of far more numerous requirements in daily life. It is gratifying to know that there are actually in existence not a few associations of this nature, consisting either of workmen alone, or of workmen and employers together, but it were greatly to be desired that they should become more numerous and more efficient. …” In Leo’s time, as mentioned, there were efforts to re-establish the guilds, one such movement later arising in England being called guild socialism, which drew on some valuable talent, such as that of the writer A R Orage and his newspaper The New Age, a movement which was also allied to both social credit and distributism.19 But what transpired was the triumph of Marxism and socialism and the relegation of the trades unions to mere instruments of class warfare.

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Hilaire Belloc, An Essay on the Restoration of Property; G K Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity, etc. For books on Catholic Social Doctrine, including Distributism see: HIS Press, http://www.ihspress.com/catalogauthor.htm 18 Founded in 1939 for the specific purpose of applying Catholic social doctrine to the problems of economics, the foundation of their policy is social credit. See: http://www.michaeljournal.org/home.htm 19 Guild socialism received great impetus from A R Orage starting ca. 1910. After World War I Orage also became an advocate for Douglas’ Social Credit, and advanced that theory in another magazine, The New English Weekly. During the Great Depression corporatist movements based on Leo XIII encyclical emerged as mass movements, including for e.g. Eoin O’Duffy’s Irish Blueshirts. In the USA, Father Charles Coughlin drew on Catholic social doctrine to form the National Union for Social Justice, advocating in particular as social credittype banking system or at least a system that repudiated usury.

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Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in veritate upholds the traditional social doctrine of Leo XIII and subsequent Popes, reiterating the corporatist conception of the state, the basis of Christian economics as a charitable ethos, and refers to the globalisation of economics, warning about the dangers of investing outside of one’s country without regard to the social consequences, and of the rise of a cosmopolitan managerial class without loyalty to anything beyond profits. Benedict sees a positive potential globalisation as having the possibility of distributing wealth in a just manner on a global scale if the basis of the system that arises is that of Christian charity.20Given that the process of globalisation is governed by people who are motivated and possessed by the spirit of Mammon, by the love of money that drives men to perdition and destruction, as Paul states in Timothy, it seems naïve to give any credence to any form of globalisation unless there is some indication that the process will proceed under Christian auspices, which it clearly will not. Marx – the Misunderstood Idealist? Prof. Sans writes on the assumption that Karl Marx is a misunderstood idealist a man motivated by the highest humanitarian ideals, whose philosophy of social justice has been taken over and perverted by communists. This naivety is precisely what Leo XIII warned of in 1890, reminding the theologians and philosophers of the Church to beware of the false theories that contain an element of truth. There are indications both doctrinally and in his personal life that Marx formulated his version of socialism as a destructive urge, and a hatred of Christ, inspired by the spirit of the Anti-christ. Marx didn’t act on his professed socialism in his personal life. For e.g. in the Communist Manifesto Marx disparages marriage as a ‘bourgeois institution’ because he claims the middle class merchant uses the women of the working class as prostitutes to such an extent as to render marriage itself meaningless.21 Marx married into the German nobility, to Jenny von Westphalen. He had an illegitimate child by his maid Helen Delmuth, and presumably since such matters were a bourgeois concern, he attributed the child to his financial mentor, Friedrich Engels22, who took this in good humour.23

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Benedict XVI, St. Peter’s, Caritas in veritate, June 29, 2009. Marx writes of marriage: “Our bourgeoisie, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.” Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 71. 22 Engels is described by Guillaume, secretary of the First International, as “a rich manufacturer accustomed to regard workmen as machine fodder and cannon fodder. (Nesta Webster, World Revolution (London: Britons Publishing Co., 1971, 167, citing James Guillaume, Documents d’Internationale, 1907.viii, 153). 23 Richard Wurmbrand, Marx – Prophet of Darkness (London: Marshall Morgan & Scott Publications Ltd., 1986), 28; citing David Rjazanov, Karl Marx: Man, Thinker, & Revolutionist (New York, International Publishers, 1927). 21

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The attitudes of Marx and Engels to the doctrine they were formulating are indicated from correspondence between the two. Of the Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote to Marx in 1847: “Now see to it that the materials you have collected are slung out into the world. It is cursedly high time. I will set to work. The Germans still do not seem clear about the practical carrying out of communism, to explain this trash [lumperei] I will write a little brochure showing that the thing has already been carried out and portray its existing practice as popular in England and America.” 24 Although Marx was perpetually in debt to tradesmen and shopkeepers, he refused to take regular employment, despite his education. He nonetheless sought to maintain a bourgeois existence for his daughters, complaining to Engels of the expense of their education, “they have private lessons in the ladies’ seminary…” Marx stated to Engels that the reason for living beyond his means was as, “the only way by which the children can make connections and enter into relations that will ensure their future. You yourself will be of the opinion that from the business point of view a purely proletarian arrangement would be unfitting.25” In order to pay the daughters’ piano lessons Marx had been obliged “to pawn the maid’s shoes.” These anomalies in Marx’s background raise questions as to Marx’s ideological sincerity and motivations. Much of the material concerning his life, it should be noted, comes from the socialist leaders Guillaume, Bebel and Bernstein. The possibility that Marx identified with Satan as an archetype of destruction is plausible insofar as personality traits such as anger, despair and alienation are themselves motives which have turned many to socialist revolution and/or to Satanism. The milieu of the 19th Century which saw Satan portrayed in terms of a romantic, heroic figure of rebellion saw radicals ranging from the anarchists Bakunin26 and

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Nesta Webster, op.cit., 167. Webster is quoting from the Marx-Engels correspondence, compiled by the Austrian socialist leaders August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx (Suttgart: Dietz, 1921), vol. 1, p. 3. 25 Nesta Webster, ibid., 169, citing August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein, ibid. Vol. 3 , p. 58. 26 Mikhail Bakunin, main rival of Marx for the leadership of the Internationale, and organiser of the anarchist movement, wrote of Satan in a style typical of the 19th century revolutionaries, most of whom were imbued with Freemasonry: “The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority, revolt in which we see the fecund germ of all human emancipations, the revolution. Socialists recognise each other with the words ‘In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done.’ Satan is the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the ideal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.” Mikhail Bakunin, God & State, 1883 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 112.

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Proudhon27 to the Italian Masonic republican politician Carducci28, identifying with Satan as the archetypal revolutionary. Marx emerged from this revolutionary milieu which upheld Satan as the archetypal revolutionary. As a youth Marx turned his hand at poetry, which possessed a dispirited outlook, and manifested Satanic themes. In Invocation of One in Despair, “So a god has snatched form me all In the curse and rack of destiny. All his words are gone beyond recall! Nothing but revenge is left to me! I shall build my throne high overhead, Cold, tremendous shall its summit be. For its bulwark – superstitious dread. For its marshal – blackest agony….”29 In a poem called The Player, Marx had referred to what appears to be a Satanic initiation: “The hellish vapours rise and fill the brain, Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. See this sword? The prince of darkness Sold it to me. For me he beats the time and gives the signs. Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.”30 In an obscure drama called Oulanem, Marx elaborates on a theme that is Satanic rather than atheistic. The name Oulanem is an inversion of a Biblical name for Jesus, Emmanuel, “God is with us”. A few quotes from the drama Oulanem suffice to indicate its nature. “And they are also Oulaneem, Oulanem The name rings forth like death, 27

Proudhon, the chief ideologue of anarchism wrote: “Come Satan, slandered by the small and by kings. God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil…I swear, God, with my hand starched out towards the heavens, that you are nothing more than the executioner of my reason, the sceptre of my conscience…God is essentially anticivilized, antiliberal and antihuman.” Pierre Proudhon, System of economical contradictions: or, the philosophy of miser (Paris: Union Generale d’Editions, 1964), pp. 199-200, 28 Carducci was a Nobel Laureate in literature, and a radical republic, anti-Catholic Senator. He wrote in 1863 the Hymn to Satan (Inno a Satana), in which Satan is cast in the figure of the heroic rebel. It was published in 1865, and again in 1869 in a revolutionary newspaper, Il Popolo, as a provocation to coincide with the 20th Vatican Ecumenical Council. This was a time of conflict with the Vatican, and in 1870 the Republican forces took Rome. The revolutionary, anti-Church era was entirely fostered by Masonry. The magazine of the Italian Grand Orient Masonry, Rivista, sated at the time in describing the Masonic god, the “Great Architect of the Universe”: “The formula of the Grand Architect, which is reproached to Masonry as ambiguous and absurd, is the most large-minded and righteous affirmation of the immense principle of existence and may represent as well the (revolutionary) God of Mazzini as the Satan of Giosue Carducci (in his celebrated Hymn to Satan); God, as the fountain of love, not of hatred; Satan, as the genius of the good, not of the bad.” 29 Richard Wurmbrand, op.cit., 10. 30 Ibid., 13.

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“Until it dies away in a wretched crawl. Stop, I’ve got it now! It rises from my soul As clear as air, as strong as my own bones. Yet I have power within my youthful arms To clench and crush you [humanity] with tempestuous force, While for us both the abyss yawns in darkness. You will sink down and I will follow laughing. Whispering in your ears, ‘Descend, Come with me, friend.’” At the end of Oulanem the goal is that of obliteration: “If there is a something which devours, I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins – The world which balks between me and the abyss I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses. I’ll throw my arms around its harsh reality: Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away, And the sink down to utter nothingness, Perished, with no existence – that would be really living.”31 Is this then the Marx that elements of the Vatican and Church academe are now stating to the world continues to be relevant as a social and economic analyst, while the traditional social doctrine of the Church becomes increasingly obscured, and the real alternatives which drew much impetus and inspiration from the Church, are virtually forgotten? And this at a time when there is no greater need than to revive the wide interest that was once shown in Church teachings on usury and corporatist society. Blood of the Martyrs The sadistic Black Mass first played out in Revolutionary France during the late 18 th Century32, the fruition of long intrigue by Masonic lodges, took bloodier and more enduring and wider form starting with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Here the Marxist creed – i.e. the ideology formulated by the rehabilitated Karl Marx - was able to given full vent to its sadistic impulses. After consolidating their position over Russia, in December 1922 the Bolsheviks began their anti-religious campaign during which – that year alone - 2691 priests, 1962 monks and 3447 were killed. Wurmbrand notes that the Bolshevik hatred of Christianity went beyond atheism, or what the communists would call “scientific materialism”. It took intensely irrational forms33 that can only be accounted for by the spirit of the Anti-christ. Solzhenitsyn writes of Yagoda, the chief of the Bolshevik Cheka terror police standing naked before images of Jesus and the saints, shooting at them.34

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Ibid., 13-16. K R Bolton, From Knights Templar to New World Order (Paraparaumu Beach, New Zealand: Spectrum Press, 2006). 33 Richard Wurmbrand, op.cit., 50-54. 34 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), Vol. I, 173. 32

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In Spain before and during the Civil War of 1936-1939, the anarchists, socialists, Stalinists and Trotskyists perpetrated a sadistic hell against the Church. Already on May 11, 1931 a socialist mob had dowsed the Jesuit Church of San Francisco de Borja with petrol and set it alight. Both the Civil Guard and the Fire Brigade, under orders from the Republican Government (upheld in the Western liberal press and by the intelligentsia as the paragons of democratic virtue and the victims of bestial fascism) looked on. Encouraged by the inaction of the Government authorities, the church burnings spread quickly to convents, monasteries, and religious schools throughout Spain. 35 These actions took place under the reign of the Provisional Government, which included as Minister of Foreign Affairs Alejandro Lerroux, a Freemason, who had once incited crowds to burn churches.36 Minister of Communications, Diego Martinez Barrio, who had his portfolio especially created at the behest of his mentor Lerroux, was Grand Master of the Grant Orient of Spain.37 Minister of Education, Mareclino Domingo, was First Assistant Grand Master of the Grand Orient. The Provisional Government was under Azana whose reaction to the anti-church actions was that, “all the convents of Spain are not worth the life of a Republican!”38 These outrages occurred for years before Franco intervened to restore order. On June 16 1936 Gil Robles, the head of the parliamentary Right, stated in parliament that among the outrages that had been conducted against the Church, 160 churches had been completely destroyed, and 251 set alight with intent at destruction. A month later Franco acted.39 During the entirety of the Civil War of 1936-1939 the number of Catholic martyrs is recorded as: 13 bishops, 4,172 diocesan priests and seminarists, 2,364 monks and friars and 283 nuns, for a total of 6,832.40

The outrages in Russia, Spain and even prior to that, beginning with the French Revolution, were the actions of occult machinations whose lineage dates back centuries to the Templars, Marx being the culmination of this Anti-christ current, who had been set the task to update and formulate an ideology that world wreak destruction upon all vestiges of order, civilisation and faith. Now the historic guardian of these, the institution that has stood out more than any other not only against the hellish doctrines of Marxism, but against those of usury and Mammon and the Lodges behind the lot, seems willing to proclaim that Marx wasn’t a bad guy after all. (K R Bolton is a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research (http://www.academy-of-social-and-political-reasearch.com). Recent published works include: “Russia and China: an approaching conflict?”, Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Washington, Summer 2009; “The Trotskyist conspiracy against 35

Brian Crozier, Franco: a biographical history (Norfolk: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1967), 115. Ibid., 110. 37 Ibid., 111. 38 Ibid., 115. 39 Ibid., 164. 40 Julio de la Cueva, "Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition and Revolution: On Atrocities against the Clergy during the Spanish Civil War" Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 33, No. 3. July 1998, 355. 36

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the family”, CKR, Sociology Department, Moscow State University, October 2009; Multiculturalism as a strategy of globalisation”, Ab Aeterno, Journal of the Academy of Social and Political Research, No. 1, November 2009. Contact: [email protected]).

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