Pope Francis: Leftists in the Vatican: Don’t lose your heart

It was a dark winter morning in Rome on January 10 this year when a small group moved across St. Peter’s Square to the seat of Pope Francis. Almost all of them had been working together for almost a decade for a new dialogue between Christians on the one hand and socialists with a Marxist orientation on the other. It began with another audience ten years earlier, when the Pope met Alexis Tsipras, the candidate for Greek Prime Minister, the representative of the Catholic grassroots movement Focolare Movement (with over 150,000 official members worldwide in 182 countries) and Walter Baier, chairman of the left-wing European Network Transform, received.

Based on this meeting with the Pope in 2014, DIALOP was formed. This network promotes and supports dialogue between people with secular and religious backgrounds, especially between socialists/Marxists and Christians. In collaboration with universities and other formal or informal educational institutions, DIALOP aims to develop and implement the areas of social ethics, applying the principles of Marx’s social criticism and the social teaching of the Church. In 2020/21, this dialogic process of seminars, a summer university, conferences gave rise to a position paper written by Professor Bennie Calebaut from Italy’s Sophia University and the author of this article. It was discussed and adopted in Cadiz.

Starting from the history of violent intellectual and political controversies between Catholicism and Marxism, the ideological foundations of a new community were explored. On January 10, this position paper – along with other documents – was presented to the Pope. It attempts to answer the question “why were these two ‘social forces’ unable two hundred years ago to unite their efforts against the then emerging misery of millions of people caused by the Industrial Revolution and to join in triumph of the wild capitalism of that time?” What can they do today in a new commonality? The position paper ended with the words: “Only together will we be saved by working for an economy of life; for a community of caring; for a politics of solidarity-based transformation; for a world in which there is room for many worlds; for the dignity of every individual in a rich world of commons and for a coexistence of peace.«

The Pope began his speech during the almost forty-minute audience on January 10th with the words: “I am pleased to greet you, the representatives of DIALOP, who for many years have committed themselves to the common cause through dialogue between socialists/Marxists and Christians Have committed well. A Latin American writer once wrote that humans have two eyes, one made of flesh and one made of glass. With the former they see what they are looking at; with the other you see what you dream of. Today, in a world divided by war and polarization, we risk losing the ability to dream. We Argentines say: ‘no te arrugues’, ‘don’t lose your heart’. This is also my invitation to you: Don’t lose your heart, don’t give up, don’t stop dreaming of a better world. For it is the gift of imagination, the ability to dream, in which intelligence, intuition, experience and historical memory come together to enable us to create, seize opportunities and take risks. How often in the years that have passed have great dreams of freedom and equality, dignity and fraternity, dreams that reflected God’s own dream, produced breakthroughs and progress.”

It is no coincidence that this Pope was the first “in the succession” of Peter to choose the name Francis, because Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) was more than anyone else in church history in favor of the option for the poor the dispossessed, the excluded. His first trip as pope took him to Lampedusa to express his horror at the mass deaths in the Mediterranean, on the EU’s shores. In the Catholic Church, under Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was elected Pope in 2013, the connection between commitment to the poor, the environment and peace became the focus of Catholic teaching. He condemned the prevailing economic order more harshly than any pope before him with the words: “This economy kills!” At the same time, a new socialism is emerging that focuses on the questions of socio-ecological transformation and a new global order and does so in a comprehensive manner Sound understanding of human rights.

Encounters like the one in Rome on January 10th show that completely new alliances are possible and are needed to formulate a hard no to these developments and to concrete ones in times of wars and ideological confrontation, environmental destruction on a global scale and persistent global poverty to work on solidarity alternatives. In dark times like ours, such encouraging signs are desperately needed.

Michael Brie, professor of philosophy and long-time director of the Institute for Social Analysis at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, is a member of the Leibniz Society and the scientific advisory board of Attac. The position paper mentioned is available at: https://dialop.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/DIALOP_PositionPaper_U_20221012_dt.pdf