Dear Friends,

The Church recently celebrated the feast day of Pope St. John Paul II. Often God works in subtle ways to steer the events of history towards His plan for the human family. But the election of John Paul II was anything but subtle. If you remember back to 1978, after the death of Pope Paul VI the Cardinals gathered for the first Conclave in 18 years and many of them had never participated in a Conclave. So, they elected John Paul I, Albino Luciano from Venice.

But a mere 30 days later he was dead and the Cardinals reassembled for another Conclave. It almost seems that they had to elect John Paul I in order to come back and now knowing the process find the courage to elect the first non-Italian as Pope in 500yrs. And not just a non-Italian but a Pole and one from a Communist country.

When he appeared on the balcony of St. Peter’s everyone knew that day that the world had changed in a dramatic way. And no one understood this more than the Communist officials in the Soviet Union. To them, John Paul II was a mortal threat. If you read George Weigel’s biography of John Paul II, “The End and the Beginning” he details how the Communists authorities tried to discredit the new Pope, tried to undermine him and how they infiltrated the Vatican with their spies. When all that failed then came the assassination attempt on John Paul II.

Communism and Christianity are incompatible. In order for Marxism to thrive in a society it has to neutralize Christianity. The Soviets tried to outright vanquish Christianity but failed. The more they tried the stronger the underground Church became and the fiercer the resistance from individual Believers grew until as Solzhenitsyn so eloquently wrote, their witness told the world: “it is a lie”. None of that was lost on the Communist Party of China and so rather than trying to vanquish the Church they try to control it. But ultimately, they will probably learn that trying to control the Gospel is akin to trying to control fire.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) the founder of the Italian Communist Party was one of the first to realize that capitalism was not the number one enemy of communism rather that position was held by Christianity. And he insisted that Marx’s ‘Worker’s Paradise’ could never become a reality as long as Christianity held sway in a society. Gramsci was no lightweight. He was well versed in Catholic teaching and Thomistic philosophy. He also knew that no armed communist revolution could ever succeed in the West. Rather his writings taught his followers ways to undermine Christianity and the values that it had instilled in Western societies. He warned his followers not to waste time on capitalist oppressors but rather to go after the faith-based culture they lived in and to use democratic means, not violent revolution, to achieve power and then use that power to destroy Christian cultural dominance.

And how to do that? Start by influencing the culture, winning over the intellectuals, the academics, implant itself in the press, the publishing houses and the media. This is what has come to be known as “Cultural Marxism”. Strip the public square from any awareness of God and the idea that humans are created in the image and likeness of God will be replaced by the idea that humans exist solely for the benefit of the state, which has replaced God.

What we are living through is this revolution of Cultural Marxism. Gramsci’s vision is succeeding. When parents are told they have no right to control the education of their children, when the normal desire for marriage and the family becomes “oppressive heteronormativity”, when biological sex is defined as a tool for social control and suppression, when the entirety of Western civilization is seen as an evil tool constructed by heterosexual white men for the purpose of enslaving everyone else then you know Gramsci’s ideas have been successful. For the Cultural Marxist who has a hammer, every Western value is nail that is somehow linked to a system of oppression.

Antonio Gramsci is probably the most influential thinker you have never heard of. But we are currently living with the consequences of his Marxist ideology. Pope St. John Paul II understood all this. It’s one reason he traveled the world warning us of what will come if we fail to act and by his writings making the case for why a culture built on the values of the Bible is far superior in terms of human freedom and human flourishing than a culture built on a Marxist ideology.

In light of all that has happened just in the time since he died, we would do well to go back and reread what he wrote and taught so we can combat the disintegration of our culture and our children’s futures. And no matter how dark it may get; we need to always keep front and center the Saint’s constant admonition: Be Not Afraid!

Love, Fr. John B.

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