Communism and the Catholic Apologist

Extract

We deplore the spread of communism as much as we disapprove of much of the inept propaganda which seeks to combat it. I do not refer to the patently discreditable propaganda associated with certain phases of Capitalism so much as to the ingenuous claptrap of respectable journals which, apart from the disrepute attaching to the quotation of doubtful statistics, sins solely by debility. I am not concerned with the advisability of the religious apologist’s carefully abstaining from polemic which may be too easily mistaken for partisan political thought; nor am I involved in anything beyond a thesis based on the urgent necessity of a mutual unobstructed apprehension on the part of Catholic and Communist—of a better understanding generally of two great world influences, Catholicism and Communism.

Slight as is his real appreciation of the Church, the educated Bolshevik has greater superficial knowledge of Catholicism than has the average Catholic of applied communism (a recent experiment from which he is geographically more or less remote) or of a communist theory which is buried in tomes of an abstruseness beyond his patience. To the Western mind in the mass the Bolshevik is a rather remarkable combination of two extreme opposites. He is represented as a combination of incredible cunning and fatuousness. His propaganda, we are told, is, in its astuteness, the first step to a communist diabolarchy; but we are left to infer that he is practically incapable of intellectual process, or, if he engages at all in dispute he is to be demolished by arguments that would discredit a school debating society.