Liberation Theology Has Never Been Catholic, Until Now

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'Martyred for the Faith' just because he defended the poor and oppressed

‘Martyred for the Faith’ just because he defended the poor and oppressed

John Zmirak responds to the recent revelations by a powerful KGB defector that Liberation Theology, so emulated and resurrected by the Franciscan Pontificate yet suppressed until now, was formulated in Soviet Russia.  After recapping the story and some well-known responses, including John Allen’s accusation that the United States exported forms Protestantism south, he writes:

Whatever problems one might have with Pentecostalism, it is genuinely Christian, which Liberation Theology isn’t. It’s scarcely theology. And it doesn’t liberate. In Latin America, it served or serves as the pious fig-leaf for nasty dictatorships like the Sandinistas’ in Nicaragua, and the Chavistas’ in Venezuela. Its watered-down American version — popular among leftists who still claim to be Catholic — offers political cover for pro-abortion, anti-marriage lawmakers, who hope they can buy back their souls by dispensing some extra food stamps and reducing their carbon footprints.

Much worse than Liberation Theology’s worldly effects are the spiritual poisons it trades in: toxic envy, gut-gnawing resentment, a craving for the chance to mete out violence, a scorn for thrift and honest work and an acid cynicism that reduces every human relationship to a swap of money or power. All this in the name of Jesus.

These old lessons should be well-remembered in our time.

It doesn’t seem that Communism or Liberation Theology have waned today.  Instead they have quickly become so pervasive in the world and in the Church that a free faithful alternative no longer exists with which to compare them.  The Faith is so rare and the propaganda machine is so vast, we are now almost entirely immersed in calculated lies.

Put briefly and starkly, Liberation Theology treats Jesus as a proto-revolutionary who came to save the poor from social injustice. The Kingdom of God is the earthly paradise which we will construct from the ruins of Satanic capitalism. The church serves the role of the Party, as the vanguard of the sacred class chosen by History (oops, I meant to say “Jesus”) to overturn the wicked “structures of sin,” and put the Sermon on the Mount into action at the point of a bayonet. The meek shall inherit the earth, once we’ve rounded up all the non-meek into gulags and confiscated their land. You know, the way the Soviets saved Ukraine from greedy farmers in the 1930s.

It sounds like thinly veiled Marxist theory, and that’s exactly what it is. As Norman Cohn and Eric Voegelin showed, Marx himself seized the Christian vision of a New Jerusalem after the Second Coming, dragged it into politics, and dressed it up in a white lab coat as a “scientific” prediction of a this-worldly utopia. Instead of the Second Coming, he inserted “the Revolution,” and in place of the Christian church he plugged in the proletariat and the Party. For decades, idealists around the world were willing to conspire, betray their country, go to prison, die — and wherever they came to power, to kill their fellow men by the tens of millions, and imprison millions more, to force Marx’s kingdom to come.

Leftism is always relentless, not because it works, but because it’s evil. They never learn or give up.  There is no reason to stop trying and hating when you have an eternity before you.

The sordid failure of materialist Marxism to fulfill any — even one — of its messianic promises posed a problem for people who were still, for their own reasons, drawn to revolutionary fantasies that entailed gaining power, confiscating other people’s property and silencing them by force. History, it is perfectly clear, is not inexorably driven to produce a dictatorship of the proletariat. It took Soviet tanks to remind the workers of Hungary and Poland of what was good for them. It demanded concrete walls and barbed wire to stop the common people from fleeing “people’s” regimes by the millions, to live instead in wicked capitalist lands where they would be exploited. What to do, if you still find reality intolerable, and crave a revolution?

You turn to magic. You create a “god from a machine.” You twist people’s faith in Christ into the self-confidence of a conquering social class. You drag down their hope for heaven, and rope it to wishes for cheaper gas and more cassavas. You teach them that real love, tough love, amounts to a cold-blooded calculation about maximizing utility: To make that liberating omelet, Jesus wants you to crack some heads. Perversely, as Marxism by natural means began to collapse all around the world, liberation theologians tried to revive it by calling it Christian.

Look for this in the Pope’s goals, in his allies, and in his rhetoric.  You won’t have to look hard.

 

 

 

Who Created FrancisChurch?

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FrancisPriest and his friend, Raul

FrancisChurch priest and his friend, Raul: advocates for ‘the poor’

At National Review, Ion Mihai Pacepa brings back a too-quickly forgotten reality of the Latin American Church.

History often repeats itself, and if you have lived two lives, as I have done, you have a good chance of seeing the reenactment with your own eyes.

Liberation theology, of which not much has been heard for two decades, is back in the news. But what is not being mentioned is its origins. It was not invented by Latin American Catholics. It was developed by the KGB. The man who is now the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, secretly worked for the KGB under the code name “Mikhailov” and spent four decades promoting liberation theology, which we at the top of the Eastern European intelligence community nicknamed Christianized Marxism.

Imagine how brilliant this idea!  In the rubble of the Vatican II earthquake, move Communist activists into the Catholic  orders and mix their ‘ideologies’ into one worldly focus.  Who would denounce the ‘holy’ goals of the Church itself?  Who could silence Marxist priests without also provoking the faithful?

Liberation theology has been generally understood to be a marriage of Marxism and Christianity. What has not been understood is that it was not the product of Christians who pursued Communism, but of Communists who pursued Christians. I described the birth of liberation theology in my book Disinformation, co-authored with Professor Ronald Rychlak. Its genesis was part of a highly classified Party/State Disinformation Program, formally approved in 1960 by KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin and Politburo member Aleksei Kirichenko, then the second in the party hierarchy after Nikita Khrushchev.

In 1971, the KGB sent Kirill — who had just been elevated to the rank of archimandrite — to Geneva as emissary of the Russian Orthodox Church to the World Council of Churches. The WCC was, and still is, the largest international religious organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations in 120 countries. Kirill/Mikhailov’s main task was to involve the WCC in spreading the new liberation theology throughout Latin America. In 1975, the KGB was able to infiltrate Kirill into the Central Committee of the WCC — a position he held until he was “elected” patriarch of Russia, in 2009. Not long after he joined the Central Committee, Kirill reported to the KGB: “Now the agenda of the WCC is also our agenda.”

There is perhaps a reason why pliant, morbid mainline protestant groups almost always echo the policy positions of the world’s bishops?

During Kirill’s years at the helm of the WCC, liberation theology put down deep roots in Latin America — where the map now has significant patches of red. Russian military ships and bombers are back in Cuba for the first time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and Russia has also newly sent ships and bombers to Venezuela.

It can be argued whether today’s Russia is aggressive or defensive, but they are clearly engaged.  And despite evidence that both Kirill and Putin may have unfairly enriched themselves, today they project Christian leadership and defend Christian values while the West just capitulates.

Pope John Paul II, who knew the Communist playbook well, was not taken in by the Soviets’ liberation theology. In 1983, his friend and trusted colleague Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who at that time was head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, discarded as Marxist the liberation-theology idea that class struggle is fundamental to history. The cardinal called liberation theology a “singular heresy” and blasted it as a “fundamental threat” to the Church.

This has in no way changed, only become more true.

Of course, it was and remains a threat — one deliberately designed to undermine the Church and destabilize the West by subordinating religion to an atheist political ideology for its geopolitical gain.

Listen for this coming from Rome today!

Now names — like Oscar Romero and Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann – not heard since the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was still en vogue, are again making international news. And here we are. The promoters of a KGB-inspired religious ideology, which once embraced violent Marxist revolution, are now denying its link to Marxism and to the KGB.

Whom is it that has rehabilitated Romero; naming him ‘martyr’ and eager to make him saint?  Who resurrected the notorious d’Escota?

Is it perhaps the one who rails constantly against the evil economic system, framing Christianity as the enemy of power and wealth? Is it the one who sees those who cling to the doctrines of Faith and the rubrics of the Mass as control-obsessed Pharisees and Lawgivers jealous of Christ, the one who thinks Communism stole the flag of Christendom?