From: Ouko joachim omolo
The News Dispatch with Omolo Beste
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2013

Brian from Naivasha, Kenya writes: Omolo Beste I read what you posted on your Faecebook timeline about Pope Francis responding to critics who have called him a “Marxist” in a new interview with an Italian newspaper, saying Marxist ideology “is wrong” while simultaneously noting that much of what he wrote in his powerful critique of capitalism is part of the fabric of the Catholic church.

Although he has admitted Marxist ideology is wrong, the fact that he admits he has met many Marxists in his life who are good people, so he does not feel offended to him it means Pope is not opposed to Marxism teaching on capitalism and ideology.

Just as Francis – the first pope ever to hail from Latin America, where he worked on behalf of the poor in his native Argentina, Karl Marx also lived and taught at the time poor people were being oppressed and exploited by the rich and wealthy people at the time.

Pope Francis has warned in “Evangelii” that the “idolatry of money” would lead to a “new tyranny.” The Pope also blasted “trickle-down economics,” saying the theory “expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.”

“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few,” he wrote.

Brian this is a good observation. While the Marxian analysis begins with an analysis of material conditions, taking at its starting point the necessary economic activities required by human society to provide for its material needs, Pope Francis warns that the “idolatry of money” would lead to a “new tyranny.”

While Karl Marx feels that religion is a system inside of a sick world, Pope Francis does not feel that way. According to Karl Marx, a world that requires illusion (religion) has something wrong with it.

Marx feels religion provides anesthesia to the masses. To him, religion is a way for people to escape from some of the suffering in their lives or to somehow feel better despite all of their suffering.

Religion he says allows people to put off their suffering because they believe it will be taken care of in heaven, or where ever, after they die. And as it would follow, religion helps people put more hope into “the year after”.

Marx is opposed to the theory that people who are religious will be better after they die. He says religion helps to maintain the oppression of the lower classed people by the people who make up the upper classes.

The second primary function of religion in a society, according to Karl Marx, is that it is the sigh of the oppressed creature. Religion brings with it a safety value. People end up being lulled into the protection religion seems to offer them, and people do feel the need to feel and be safe.

Karl Marx holds that human actions and institutions are economically determined and that class struggle is needed to create historical change and that capitalism will ultimately be superseded by communism.
When Pope Francis issued his first apostolic exhortation, declaring a new enemy for the Catholic Church: modern capitalism, he did not mean to say like Karl Marx that capitalism will ultimately be superseded by communism.

Pope Francis’s communitarian, populist message shows just how far the Church has shifted in five decades—and how thoroughly capitalism has displaced communism as a monolithic political philosophy.

Like Pope Francis, before he died in 1963, the pope who convened the Vatican II Council, John XXIII, did issue an encyclical, Pacem in Terris, which addressed the issue of “universal peace.” While he didn’t condemn communism, he did endorse democracy.

The following year, John’s successor, Pope Paul VI, made a much clearer statement against communism in his encyclical Ecclesiam Suam. “We are driven to repudiate such ideologies as deny God and oppress the Church.”

Many years later, the Polish Pope John Paul II was given credit for helping to undermine communist rule in his country, where Catholic churches provided a space for anti-communist artists and thinkers to hold discussions and distribute anti-regime writings.

Likewise, Pope Francis has only condemned the ethic and ideology that underlie free-market economies. He writes: “In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”

This is a statement about who should control financial markets. Francis says the global economy needs more government control. He writes: “It is vital that government leaders and financial leaders take heed and broaden their horizons, working to ensure that all citizens have dignified work, education and healthcare.

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few, consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.

This is what Francis means when he says a new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Against background that communism does not strike Francis as a significant ideological threat anymore.

Francis is also concerned about youth unemployment which is currently at 40 percent in Italy and 56 percent in Spain—two of Europe’s most Catholic countries.

In Africa and other developing world, the issue is not only poverty and unemployment, many people are dying from diseases which could be prevented but because of poverty they cannot afford medications.

At the same time we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day, with dire consequences. A number of diseases are spreading.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new, viewed as normal.
Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJ
Tel +254 7350 14559/+254 722 623 578
E-mail omolo.ouko@gmail.com
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Twitter-@8000accomole

Real change must come from ordinary people who refuse to be taken hostage by the weapons of politicians in the face of inequality, racism and oppression, but march together towards a clear and unambiguous goal.
-Anne Montgomery, RSCJ
UN Disarmament
Conference, 2002