How imperialism has used the pope

By Deirdre Griswold

It has been a long, long time—if ever—since the ruling classes of all the Western capitalist countries have accorded such unrestrained, reverential, even lavish honors on a leader of the Catholic Church as they are doing now on the death of Pope John Paul II.

All the achievements of modern science have been marshaled in a massive effort to convince the public that the life and death of this one person have had extraordinary, even supernatural consequences for the world.

Taking the lead is the United States, a country supposedly built on the principle of the separation of church and state, where only 24 percent of the people
identify themselves as Roman Catholics. Bri tain, where the established Anglican church broke with Rome in the 16th century, is a close second.

The media in all the major imperialist countries for weeks put much of their coverage of international and domestic events on hold to give minute details about the pope’s health, the crowds in Vatican Square awaiting his death, preparations for his funeral and retrospectives about his impact on world affairs.

Other world events, like the thousands of deaths in Indonesia from the second major earthquake in three months, or the continuing deadly conflicts in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, have received perfunctory coverage compared to the oceans of media attention devoted to the pope.

Science at the disposal of dogma

All the achievements of modern science—medical procedures to prolong the pope’s life; instant communications via satellite, television, radio and the internet informing the whole world of his condition; vehicles able to move hundreds of thousands of mourners quickly to Rome by land, air and sea—have been marshaled in a massive effort to convince the public that the life and death of this one person have had extraordinary, even supernatural consequences for the world.

The irony is that the enormous fortunes of today’s ruling capitalist class depend upon revolutionary advances in science and technology that fueled the growth of modern industry. And none of this would have been possible without the class and ideological battles during the feudal period that broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly on what people were allowed to think and say.

It was the triumph of the Enlight en ment over church dogma that freed up the natural sciences, which in turn allowed a period of stupendous development of the means of production that has totally transformed the world.

For many, many years the ruling class in the United States identified itself as WASP—white Anglo-Saxon Protestant—and took a condescending, even contemptuous attitude toward Catholics and Jews, most of whom arrived here as poor immigrants. Muslims and other religions were completely beyond the pale.

It took almost two centuries before a Catholic could be elected president—
and then he had to be the scion of an extremely wealthy and politically
powerful family. White supremacist organizations often targeted Catholics and Jews as well as African Americans.

Poland and the pope

In recent times, however, and especially since the papacy of John Paul II, the strategists of U.S. imperialism have recognized his brand of Catholicism as a very useful tool in the pursuit of their global ambitions. They could live with his professions of peace and his opposition to the death penalty. It was his active anti-communism and his cutting down of those Catholics who promoted “liberation theology,” especially in Latin America, that endeared him to the imperialists—whether they be Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or non-religious.

Karol Jozef Wojtyla was the first Polish Catholic to become pope. He was chosen at a time when Poland’s inability to solve the food problem was moving the country toward crisis. Agriculture was still privately owned and backward, despite decades of state-owned industrial development under a semi-socialist government put in place after the defeat of Nazi Germany. In effect, the workers were subsidizing an inefficient form of peasant agriculture, but their anger over poor conditions was directed at the state and its party.

Wojtyla, just eight months after becoming pope, returned to Poland in 1979 to preach to huge crowds in what was seen as an open challenge to the regime. A year later, the U.S. received him with what was the full red carpet treatment, making his visits to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Des Moines, Chicago and Washington into semi-official holidays. No representative of the Catholic Church had ever been accorded such reverential treatment before.

As the counter-revolution in Poland deepened, the movement Solidarnosc (Solidarity) was pushed among the workers by intellectuals with close ties to the CIA through the AFL-CIO affiliated American Institute for Free Labor Deve lopment. It was the only “union” movement to receive the unstinting endorsement of Ronald Reagan, the Wall Street Journal and U.S. capital in general. Wojtyla was an important link in this developing relationship.

Today, Poland is once again part of the world capitalist market. Many of the small farms in Poland that had resisted socialist collectivization have gone under—the victims of capitalist competition. The farmers’ protests and blockades of roads went largely unheeded by the world’s media—or the church. As late as 1999, one-quarter of the Polish population were employed in agriculture but produced only 6 percent of the country’s GDP. The shipyards where Solidarnosc took root have either been closed down or sold to Western corporations. Polish emigres—some of them women trafficked for prostitution—are a common sight in Western Europe.

What the church offers the Polish
people is a public, emotional outlet for their suffering. But to end that suffering, a profound revolution in social relations is necessary.

Central America
and ‘liberation theology’

At the time Wojtyla became pope, powerful movements were underway in Cen tral America to break through the political stranglehold of the landed oligarchy, supported by U.S. imperialism, and set up popular regimes attentive to the wishes and needs of the vast majority—the largely Indigenous peasants and the workers.

The suffering of the people and their desire for revolutionary change found expression in religion as well as politics, especially among the lower clergy who worked with the poor. In Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, advocates of “liberation theology” tried to move the Catholic Church hierarchy to support these struggles.

Pope John Paul II instead systematically diminished the influence of liberation theologists in the Vatican. He appointed bishops in Latin America who moved the church away from social activism, which he labeled a form of Marxism.

When activist Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered by the right wing in El Salvador in 1980, two years after Wojtyla became pope, and when even nuns there were raped and murdered by the military, the response from the Vatican was muted.

Pope John Paul II also worked assiduously to reverse the liberal orientation of the 1963 Vatican II Council and return the church to its more authoritarian, hierarchical traditions.

His commitment to the patriarchy was total. Not only would the church continue to be completely male dominated, but challenges to the patriarchal family like a woman’s right to choose when and if to have a child—including both contraception and abortionwell as the right of lesbians and gays to same-sex relationships were to be condemned.

In 1997, 2.5 million German and Austrian Catholics petitioned the pope to admit women priests and married priests and abandon the church’s hostility to homosexuality. But the Vatican was unmoved.

Wojtyla had been an actor before entering the priesthood, and made good use of his skills in charming audiences and knowing how to behave on camera, even when he was gravely ill.

All this and the adulation of the capitalist media, however, do not fully explain his popularity with many millions of ordinary people. Here it is necessary to remember what Karl Marx really said when he called religion “the opium of the people.”

He was drawing attention to the fact that capitalism has made life unbearably painful in a million ways and religion offers solace and hope, even if in a mythical afterlife. The full quote was: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

It is hard to read these words without emotion. The brutality of life under capitalism is all about us, yet people must try to get through each day without breaking down. Whether it’s belief in a better world after death, or drowning one’s sorrows in alcohol or drugs, or a combination of many things, people fend off despair and apathy, and reach out to one another, in a variety of ways.

Let us assume that John Paul’s preachings against capitalist “materialism” were sincere, even though the church hierarchy certainly do not lack material comforts. He was telling the masses of people that they should put spiritual matters before material ones. In the real world, this means accepting the inequalities of class society—the poor shall be ever with ye—and working on one’s spiritual salvation instead.

Marx, of course, was arguing for the building of a revolutionary workers’ movement that could rebuild social relations—and the love and solidarity of the human family—on a higher and more equitable level by returning ownership of the means of production to the community of workers who built them. When there is needless hunger, injustice, war and oppression, how can there be true satisfaction of our emotional and intellectual needs?

The imperialist ruling class are by their very nature extremely interested in material possessions. Yet they found common cause with Pope John Paul II. A cynic might even say he made a pact with the devil.

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