In a Vatican reception on Wednesday, Pope Francis encouraged a Marxist-Christian dialogue group, urging them to keep “dreaming of a better world” and to have “the courage to step outside the box” to create “new paths” for humanity through collaboration.
The Nicaraguan Bishop Rolando Alvarez of Matagalpa was unavailable for comment, as his country’s Marxist government has thrown him in prison on trumped-up treason charges. Similarly, Chinese bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of Zhejiang could not be located for reaction, as the Communist authorities in his country hauled him to jail on January 2nd.
Anybody even passingly familiar with the bloody persecution of Catholics and other Christians by communist governments to be anything but disgusted by Pope Francis’s words. This is personal for me. In 2020, I published Live Not By Lies, a book about the lessons we must learn from the communist persecution of Christians in the Soviet empire.
It is impossible to know for sure how many of the tens of millions of those murdered in the Soviet Union were killed primarily because they were Christian. But we do know from government documents that in the Stalinist purges of 1937-38 alone, 106,000 Orthodox priests were slaughtered. Throughout the Bolshevik reign of terror, all Christians—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—under Soviet authority were viciously persecuted, with their churches often destroyed or turned into barns and storage facilities.
This continued until the very end. One of the last Christian prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union, Alexander Ogorodnikov, was not set free until 1987. When I met him in Moscow in 2019, Ogorodnikov told me a story about a sobbing elderly guard who begged him for help from the other side of the cell. The jailer was still haunted by the memories of something he witnessed in a forest clearing in the 1950s, as he guarded the perimeter.
The jailer said that KGB agents organized “twenty or thirty” Orthodox priests in two rows, facing the same way. One of the KGB agents walked up to the first priest in one row. “Is there a God?” asked the KGB man. Yes, said the priest. The secret policeman put a pistol to the priest’s head and blew his brains out in such a way that the brain matter splattered onto the face of the priest standing behind him.
They executed every priest in this way. None were blindfolded. After the first killing, every other priest knew what was going to happen to him. Not one of those priests denied God. Ogorodnikov wept as he finished this story—a tear ran across his cheek that was paralyzed from the beatings he suffered from Soviet jailers decades earlier.
But yes, Holy Father, let us continue to dream of a better world with Marxists.
Perhaps the worst prison in all the communist world was the Pitesti facility in Romania, where the Marxist government carried out a gruesome experiment to attempt to reshape the consciousness of prisoners. Some of those held at Pitesti were Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant clergymen. The Lutheran confessor Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who suffered at Pitesti, later testified as to what he witnessed:
Then the cross was erected again and the Communists, swearing and mocking, “Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ.” And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, has been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrements, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it.
Pastor Wurmbrand added that this poor priest was “half-mad”; other clergy at Pitesti said that they learned to have mercy on their fellow captives who broke under torture, which was at times beyond the ability of humans to endure.
In other captive nations of Eastern Europe, Catholics bore the brunt of Marxist persecution. In Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia, I met Catholics who had served in the underground church, who told me stories of jaw-dropping fidelity to Christ in the face of communist cruelty. Last December, in Bratislava filming for the upcoming documentary version of Live Not By Lies, our crew interviewed Gabriela Spanikova, the only surviving sister of the late confessor Silvester Krčmery, a lay founder of the underground Catholic church in Slovakia. She recalled sitting in the courtroom at his 1954 kangaroo court trial, and listening as her brother defiantly proclaimed to the communist judges:
God gave me everything I have and now that I face persecution because of Him, and am called on to profess my faith in Him, should I now pretend I don’t believe? Should I hide my faith? Should I deny Him?
They sent him to prison for ten years. In his 1996 memoir of that experience, This Saved Us, Krčmery, who died in 2013, writes that after repeated beatings and torture, he realized that the only way he would make it through his sentence was to rely entirely on faith. He wrote that he decided to be “like Peter, to close my eyes and throw myself into the sea.”
Thank God he was in no position to be like Peter’s successor on the papal throne, Francis, who might well have faulted Krčmery for being “rigid” in his dealings with the Marxists there. Alas for Krčmery, he could not “step outside the box,” because he lived behind bars.
This is how it always was with Marxists. People today only ever hear about the Spanish Civil War in terms of Nationalist atrocities. Far fewer contemporaries know about the mass murder of priests during the war (1936-39), and atrocities like the 1936 exhumation of the bodies of nuns, which were publicly displayed and defiled. The anti-Catholic violence did not begin with the start of the war. As far back as 1931, over 100 convents throughout Spain were set on fire by Marxists, while the Republican government refused to act to protect the nuns.
The “new path,” to use Francis’s phrase, that the Spanish Marxists wanted to open for humanity would be blazed by the flames of burning convents.
Pope St. John Paul II, who personally withstood communist persecution as Archbishop of Krakow, visited communist Nicaragua in 1983. On the tarmac after he landed, the pope openly scolded Ernesto Cardenal, a priest who served in the Sandinista government. The Marxist regime, then as now persecuting the faithful, made the Holy Father’s pilgrimage so difficult that John Paul later referred to it as a “great dark night.”
The stories of communist cruelty to Christians are endless. There is no reason at all why Jorge Maria Bergoglio does not know them. As Catholic philosopher Edward Feser writes:
Francis’s ten predecessors at least knew that Marxism was radically incompatible with Catholicism. But not Francis. Indeed, in 2018. a high Vatican official praised the Chinese Communists, saying that “those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.”
One hopes that news of the Holy Father’s gutless abasement before the Marxists at the Vatican does not reach the prison cells of Bishop Alvarez and Bishop Zhumin. They have enough to suffer without knowing that the pope has cozied up to their persecutors. Then again, this wouldn’t be the first time that Peter has abandoned Christ.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/popes-marxist-dreams/
