Marco Ferrando, Partido Comunista dei Lavoratori
As communists, we do not join in the universal, unanimous mourning for the death of Pope Bergoglio.
In particular, we disagree with the ecstatic commemoration of his figure by the so-called radical left.
Of course we deeply respect religious freedom and the feelings of the personal religious faith. But not at cost of the truth. Religion – any religion – is the opium of the people, as Marx wrote. The Catholic Church is the main world-wide dispenser of this opium, celebrated by religious worship. The Pope – every Pope – is at the head of this religious worship. The preaching of an afterlife and resurrection of „flesh and bones“ promotes resignation to a life on earth marked by exploitation and oppression for billions of human beings. The call for compassion towards the humbles not only does not change the real order of things but assumes its preservation, against any perspective of revolution. Care for the poor? Even during the Counter-Reformation, while waging witch hunt, Catholic Church multiplied charity and welfare religious orders to protect the poors, in order to blunt the threat of Protestantism.
More generally, the very idea of a God the Father creator of man, by denying the figure of man as God’s creator, educates the man to submission. It is not by chance that the Jesuit Order, founded by Ignatius of Loyola, saw in earthly authority the reflection of God, and in obedience to authority the duty of obedience to God. Moreover, the same rhetoric of equality and brotherhood among ‚God’s creatures‘ unfailingly proves its own hypocrisy when it comes to women, gays, lesbians, transgender people, which are more than half of the human mankind. Moreover, the Catholic Church’s internal order is based on the inequality between men and women, with women harshly excluded from priesthood. Pope Bergoglio always stood – even in recent times – against abortion, compared by him to murder; against abortion doctors, which he labeled as ‚hitmen‘, while comparing weaponry to contraceptives as both suppressors of life.
As for cleaning the Catholic Church of child abuse, and the huge amount of crimes against children and nuns at all latitudes of the world, Bergoglio has not gone beyond the denunciation. In 2022 the daily newspaper Domani documented that the Vatican just transferred the abuser priests to other dioceses, and continued to pressure the victims not to make the abuse public. Bergoglio confirmed ecclesiastical jurisdiction as the only possible court for paedophile cases, thus rescuing them from ordinary justice. This amounts to nothing more than a guarantee of protection of these criminals, contrary to every principle of equality before the law. The concordat between State and Holy See also protect the Catholic Church’s judicially and legally.
It is true that Pope Bergoglio has spoken out on several occasions in defence of migrants, nature protection, and against war. He tried to rehabilitate on different levels the image of the Catholic Church from its deep crisis by trying to connecting to the progressive mood of important sectors of public opinion and the younger generation. Above all, he wanted to address the deep crisis of the Catholics in the West (particularly in Europe and the USA), and the growing competition of Islam on a global scale, by seeking wider areas of Catholic influence in oppressed continents, starting with Africa. But he did not succeed.
Words remain words, though, on the lips of the Pope as on the lips of ‚democratic‘ and ‚humanitarian‘ bourgeois rulers. Words, divorced from action, do not serve to change reality, but to mask it.
Moreover, Bergoglio’s own words have been careful to avoid dangerous misunderstandings. To speak of ‚war‘ and ‚peace‘ as universal and abstract categories is to erase the boundary between imperialist wars of the oppressors and wars of liberation of the oppressed. To do this is tantamount to protecting the oppressors, in the end. Does denouncing the Gaza massacre as ignoble, but condemning or ignoring the Palestinian resistance, change anything for the oppressed people? Someone will say that it is not the role of a Pope to publicly support resistance. Quite true. But what exactly is the role of the Pope, then? This is the question.
The role of the Pope – every Pope – is inseparable from the nature of the Church. The Church is a reactionary institution. A theocratic, absolutist monarchy. The Pope, every Pope, as Head of the Church, is by institution an absolute ruler who concentrates all power in his hands. The so-called division of powers (executive, legislative, judiciary), characteristic of liberal bourgeois democracies, is alien to the Church. The Pope rules over the Church’s patrimonial assets, because all the different administrations of ecclesiastical property, real estate, finance, shares, are under his personal control. Church property is immense. In Italy alone, the Church has the primacy of real estate, net of places of worship. These properties are largely exempt from any tax obligations. On the other hand, the state revenues, both central and local, provide in various forms the transfer of public resources into the ecclesiastical pockets (payment of religion teachers, costs of buildings renovation…).
The Catholic Church is full-fledged ecclesiastical capitalism. The financial scandals linked to the Church are a reflection of its nature. The recent St. Peter’s Obolus scandal, for example, revealed that charity funds for the poor are being used for financial and business transactions of the Church in wealthy urban neighbourhoods. Can anyone seriously wonder at this?
Pope Bergoglio changed nothing, because he could not change anything in the material nature of the Church. As a good ruler, he just tried to handle it. He certainly tried to change the forms of communication by moving away from the doctrinaire canon of Pope Ratzinger in favour of a more popular and direct language. He has aimed to shift the balance of power with the Vatican Secretariat of State to his own advantage, using his personal relationship with Catholics as leverage towards the hierarchy. In this sense, paradoxically, Bergoglio has even more emphasised the absolutist nature of the papacy in relation to the Vatican order. His Peronist and Jesuit background has certainly helped him with it.
The basic knot remains, which goes beyond Bergoglio himself. Can the figure of an absolute sovereign, head of a theocratic and capitalist monarchy, be presented as a «communist» (by the leader of PRC, Communist Refoundation Party, Maurizio Acerbo) and as «great revolutionary» personality (by the organization RdC, Network of Communists, and by the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto)?
The reverent subordination to the papacy, the enchantement of his words, reflects the adaptation to bourgeois society, in the final analysis. That is, to aband the aim of overthrowing the real social order of this world. Revolutionary Marxism has a point also in this case.