QUOTATION: Communism

The problem for Europe is that although the fallacy of the Communist economy has been recognized, its moral and religious fallacy has not.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Communism

A bishop can attach himself to communism only at the expense of his own cause.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty

QUOTATION: Communism

In every social class there are compassionate people who take the side of the poor and the suffering and who desire a just social order. Such people often become unwittingly the henchmen of the Communists. Their cooperation yields propagandistic gains for the Marxist movement. Often such sympathizer are won over by Communism's empty promises of equality,  the elimination of all earthly misery, the welfare state, and a happy, classless society in a free world. But the Communist ideology can achieve lasting effects only where the religious foundations of a nation have been undermined so that reason, faith in God, and morality do not offer sufficient resistence to such ideas.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, Memoirs, 1974

QUOTATION: The Fall of Communism

It would be simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the fall of Communism. In a certain sense Communism as a system fell by itself. It fell as a consequence of its own mistakes and abuses. It proved to be a medicine more dangerous than the disease itself. It did not bring about true social reform, yet it did become a powerful threat and challenge to the entire world. But it fell by itself, because of its own inherent weakness.

--Pope St. John Paul II

QUOTATION: Communism

The communist systems collapsed under the weight of their own fallacious economic dogmatism. Commentators have nevertheless ignored all too readily the role in this demise played by the communists’ contempt for human rights and their subjugation of morals to the demands of the system and the promises of the future. The greatest catastrophe encountered by such systems was not economic. It was the starvation of souls and the destruction of the moral conscience.

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, (Pope Benedict XVI), Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Chistianity, Islam, 2004

QUOTATION: Communists

If Communists used as much violence on their selfishness as they use on others, they would all be saints!

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: The Philosphical Legacy of Marxism

The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized-- so much so that former communists have unhesitatingly become economic liberals-- the moral and religious question that it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original uncertainties about God, himself and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today. Left untreated, it could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger […].

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, (Pope Benedict XVI), Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Chistianity, Islam, 2004

QUOTATION: Communism

We know that communism fell in the end because of the system’s socioeconomic weakness, not because it has been truly rejected as an ideology or a philosophy. In certain quarters in the West, there are still those who regret its passing.

--Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005