Is Pope Francis a Marxist?

Last updated on: December 24, 2013 at 2:40 pm by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Is Pope Francis a Marxist? 2013-12-24T14:40:35-05:00 Kathryn Jean Lopez

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Michael Coren, author of the new book, The Future of Catholicism, and I had this exchange recently, which may be of interest if this is a question in your mind:

LOPEZ: You write that in the face of liberation theology, Pope Francis, before he was pope, “was obliged to work out his own deeply Catholic yet non-socialist response to poverty.” You further write that “socialism has failed the poor, and governments of various stripes have not managed to address the deeper problems of poverty.” Is that Bergoglio or Coren? Is your read that Pope Francis is not a Marxist wishful thinking? What is Pope Francis’s “deeply Catholic yet non-socialist response to poverty”?

COREN: He was not liked by liberation theologians and Marxist Jesuits in Latin America, and when he was elected, many of them were apparently in despair. The liberation theological tradition is an arrogant one, assumes that only it has the answers to poverty, and is directly Marxian in its analysis of class and power. As such, it’s extremely old-fashioned, because Marxism has been tried in Europe, Asia, and Africa and failed miserably each time. Marxism is materialistic, and Francis is not. As a working-class Englishman born in 1959, I was a product of a social democracy and a Labor party that “owed more to Methodism than to Marx,” and this European/Latin American approach has to be understood if we are to appreciate the pope’s view on economic justice. There is nothing Marxist about making sure a child is fed and educated, and indeed some Marxists would condemn this as capitalist tampering with a system that has to be brought down. Socialism inevitably leads to more state power and less individual and thus religious freedom, and Francis is acutely aware of this.

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