Word: communisms
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...grave illness of the past four months, however, His Holiness was generally thought to have said his last say. But the doughty Pontiff heartened his flock by rallying toward the beginning of Lent, and last week Pius XI released his 29th encyclical, a 13,000-word denunciation of Communism, suddenly and startlingly followed this on Palm Sunday with No. 30, addressed to the faithful of Germany and forecasting a rupture between the Holy See and the Third Reich...
...world in general, the Pope's blast against Communism was able but not new. Catholics who read an official abstract of the encyclical, issued by the Vatican, found little in it which their priests and publicists had not ceaselessly voiced, at the Pope's orders, during the past year...
...simply that the Church is against Communism, the theory of which scholarly Pius XI deftly synthesized in four sentences: "The doctrine of Communism was founded on the principles of dialectical and historical materialism previously advocated by Marx, of which the theoreticians of Bolshevism claim to possess the only genuine interpretation. According to this doctrine, there is in the world only one reality, matter, the blind forces of which evolve into plant, animal...
Even human society is nothing but phenomena and a form of matter evolving in the same way. By the law of inexorable necessity and through the perpetual conflict of forces, matter moves toward the final synthesis of a classless society." Offering no concrete alternative to Communism, "Since this is not [the Church's] field," Pius XI nevertheless begged for Catholic "equilibrium of truth and justice" in a passage which liberal Catholics hoped was a rap at Fascism. Since the Church now appears to get along well with Fascism of the Italian variety, the rap seemed to apply to Naziism...
...over by the pervasive enthusiasm, and persuaded to forgive them the lack of any brilliance. Their attempts at social comment are especially feeble. They apparently felt that no play could dare to appear before this hyper-socially-conscious world without some reference to President Roosevelt, the American race problem, Communism, and "Comes the Revolution", even if that play be an avowed farce. Their allusions to these matters betray an awkwardness and an uneasiness and nothing more...