{"id":2299,"date":"2015-05-07T15:33:37","date_gmt":"2015-05-07T19:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/66.147.242.160\/~stumbli4\/?p=2299"},"modified":"2015-05-07T15:34:02","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T19:34:02","slug":"liberation-theology-has-never-been-catholic-until-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/?p=2299","title":{"rendered":"Liberation Theology Has Never Been Catholic, Until Now"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"'Martyred<\/a>

‘Martyred for the Faith’ just because he defended the poor and oppressed<\/p><\/div>\n

John Zmirak responds <\/a>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.\u00a0 After recapping the story and some well-known responses, including John Allen’s accusation that the United States exported forms Protestantism south, he writes:<\/p>\n

Whatever problems one might have with Pentecostalism, it is genuinely Christian, which Liberation Theology isn\u2019t. It\u2019s scarcely theology. And it doesn\u2019t liberate. In Latin America, it served or serves as the pious fig-leaf for nasty dictatorships like the Sandinistas\u2019 in Nicaragua, and the Chavistas\u2019 in Venezuela. Its watered-down American version \u2014 popular among leftists\u00a0who still claim to be Catholic\u00a0\u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Much worse than Liberation Theology\u2019s\u00a0worldly 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These old lessons should be well-remembered in our time.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t seem that Communism or Liberation Theology have waned today.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Faith is so rare and the propaganda machine is so vast, we are now almost entirely immersed in calculated lies.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cJesus\u201d) to overturn the wicked \u201cstructures of sin,\u201d and put the Sermon on the Mount into action at the point of a bayonet. The meek shall inherit the earth, once we\u2019ve rounded up all the non-meek into gulags and confiscated their land. You know, the way the Soviets saved Ukraine <\/a>from greedy farmers in the 1930s.<\/p>\n

It sounds like thinly veiled Marxist theory, and that\u2019s exactly what it is. As Norman Cohn<\/a> and Eric Voegelin <\/a>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 \u201cscientific\u201d prediction of a this-worldly utopia. Instead of the Second Coming, he inserted \u201cthe Revolution,\u201d 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 \u2014 and wherever they came to power, to kill their fellow men by the tens of millions, and imprison millions more, to force Marx\u2019s kingdom to come.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Leftism is always relentless, not because it works, but because it’s evil. They never learn or give up.\u00a0 There is no reason to stop trying and hating when you have an eternity before you.<\/p>\n

The sordid failure of materialist Marxism to fulfill any \u2014 even one \u2014 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\u2019s 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 \u201cpeople\u2019s\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

You turn to magic. You create a \u201cgod from a machine.\u201d You twist people\u2019s 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Look for this in the Pope’s goals, in his allies, and in his rhetoric.\u00a0 You won’t have to look hard.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 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 …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,26,59,238,63,83,300],"class_list":["post-2299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-become-catholic","tag-catholic","tag-communism","tag-kgb","tag-liberation-theology","tag-oscar-romero","tag-zmirak"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2299"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2329,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299\/revisions\/2329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}