Klaus Hart Brasilientexte

Pope Benedict XVI is right: Marxism is no longer useful. True – Marxism as many in the Catholic Church understand it: an atheistic ideology which justified Stalin’s crimes and the barbarities of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. To accept that Marxism according to Ratzinger’s view is the same Marxism as Marx’s view would be like identifying Catholicism with the Inquisition.

http://www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendungen/religionen/879347/

http://www.ila-web.de/brasilientexte/2007/ciasekten.htm

Frei Betto beim Website-Interview im Dominikaner-Konvent von Sao Paulo.

“Ich befürchte, daß wie im Falle von Bin Laden ein solches Kommando in Libyen eindringt, um Gaddafi zu töten.” http://www.hart-brasilientexte.de/2011/05/12/das-system-libyens-die-dortige-regierung-ist-popular-hat-im-lande-die-mehrheit-hinter-sich-ich-befurchte-das-wie-im-falle-von-bin-laden-ein-solches-kommando-in-libyen-eindringt-um-gaddafi-zu-to/

>It could be said today that Catholicism is no longer useful. Because it is no longer justifiable to send women believed to be witches to the stake nor to torture suspects of heresy. Happily Catholicism cannot be identified with the Inquisition or with the paedophilia of priests and bishops. Similarly, Marxism is not to be mistaken with the Marxists who used it to spread fear or terror or to suffocate religious freedom. One must go back to Marx to know what Marxism is, just as one must go back to the Gospels and to Jesus to know what Christianity is and to Francis of Assisi to know what Catholicism is.Throughout history, in the name of most beautiful words, the most horrendous crimes were committed. In the name of democracy, the USA seized Puerto Rico and the Cuban base at Guantánamo. In the name of progress, Western European countries colonised African peoples leaving a trail of poverty. In the name of freedom, Britain’s Queen Victoria promoted the devastating Opium War in China. In the name of peace, the White House committed history’s  most daring and genocidal attack: dropping atomic bombs on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the name of freedom, for three decades, the USA implanted bloody dictatorships in almost all of Latin America (1960-1980). Marxism is a method for analysing reality. And it is more than ever useful for understanding the present crisis in capitalism. Capitalism, yes, is no longer useful for it promoted the most outstanding social inequality amongst the world’s population; it centred the world balance on nuclear arsenals and disseminated neo liberal ideology, which reduces the human being to a mere consumer who submits to the enchantments of merchandise.Capitalism is today hegemonic in the world. Of the 7 billion people who inhabit the planet, 4 billion live below the poverty line and 1.2 billion suffer from chronic hunger. Capitalism failed for 2/3 of humanity who do not have access to a life of dignity. Where Christianity and Marxism speak of solidarity, capitalism introduced rivalry; where they speak of cooperation, it introduced competition; where they speak of respect for the sovereignty of peoples, it introduced globocolonisation. >Religion is not a method for analysing reality. Marxism is not a religion. The light that faith projects on reality is, whether the Vatican likes it or not, always mediated by an ideology. The neo liberal ideology which identifies capitalism and democracy today prevails in the conscience of many Christians and hinders them from seeing that capitalism is intrinsically perverse. The Catholic Church is often  in connivance with capitalism because it covers it with privileges and grants it a freedom which is denied, through poverty, to millions of human beings.>Now, it has been proved that capitalism does not assure a future of dignity for humanity. Benedict XVI admitted this when he affirmed that we must seek new models. Marxism, when it analyses the contradictions and insufficiencies of capitalism, opens a door of hope to a society which Catholics, when they celebrate the Eucharist, characterise as a world where all will “share the fruits of the Earth and the work of human hands”. This is what Marx called socialism.>Reinhard Marx, the Catholic archbishop of Munich, in 2011 launched a book entitled “Das Kapital – a legacy in favour of humanity”. The front cover has the same colours and graphics as the first edition of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, published in Hamburg in 1867.<“Marx is not dead and it is necessary to take him seriously” said the prelate at the book’s launching. “We must confront Karl Marx’s work which helps us to understand the theories of capitalist accumulation and of mercantilism. This does not mean allowing ourselves to be attracted by the aberrations and atrocities committed in its name in the Twentieth Century The author of the new “Das Kapital”, who became a cardinal under Benedict XVI in November 2010, qualifies as “social-ethical” the principles defended in his book, he criticises neo liberal capitalism, qualifies speculation as “savage” and “sinful” and advocates that the economy needs to be re-designed according to the ethical rules of a new economic and political order.“The rules of the game must have ethical quality. In this sense, the social doctrine of the Church is critical of capitalism” the archbishop affirms.>The book begins with a letter from Reinhard Marx to Karl Marx whom he calls his “dear namesake” and who died in 1883. He begs him now to acknowledge his mistake regarding God’s existence. What he suggests, between the lines, is that the author of the “Communist Manifesto” might well find himself amongst those who enjoy the beatific vision of God on the other side of life.

Frei Betto is a writer, author of the novel “Um homem chamado Jesus” (A Man called Jesus) (Rocco).  www.freibetto.org <http://www.freibetto.org/> twitter: @freibetto.   

 ABOUT FREI BETTO>He is a Brazilian Dominican with an international reputation as a liberation theologian.Within Brazil he is equally famous as a writer, with over 52 books to his name.  In 1985 he won Brazil’s most important literary prize, the Jabuti, and was elected Intellectual of the Year by the members of the Brazilian Writers’ Union. Frei Betto has always been active in Brazilian social movements, and has been an adviser to the Church’s ministry to workers in São Paulo’s industrial belt, to the Church base communities, and to the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST).