Workers Vanguard No. 1093
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29 July 2016
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Pope’s Inquisition Targets Journalists-The Vatican: Cancer of Italy
Via Crucis and Avarizia detail the finances of the Vatican, whose institutions manage its own and others’ assets totaling approximately 9-10 billion euros [$10-11 billion]. The financial shenanigans they document include fraud, the high-flying lifestyles of cardinals, extensive international investments, the huge moneymaking business of church hospitals, the Vatican bank’s schemes and intrigues, and the real value of the Pope’s finances. The London Review of Books (18 February) aptly described what the two books reveal:
“The anecdotes are endless: the monsignor who appropriates a room from the adjacent apartment of a poorer priest simply by knocking down the party wall while the other man is in hospital; the diplomat priest who takes advantage of the diplomatic bag to carry mafia money across the Swiss border; the organisation Propaganda Fide, instituted to evangelise the world, that spends relatively little on this mission while owning almost a thousand valuable properties in and around Rome, many of them rented way below market price to friends and favourites.
“It is striking how many Catholic organisations seem to do a whole range of lucrative things they were never set up to do, while still enjoying tax exemption as religious institutions. When priests in Salerno were granted €2.3 million of public money to build an orphanage in a depressed urban area, they built a luxury hotel instead. Found guilty of appropriating funds under false pretences in 2012, the archbishop of Salerno avoided punishment when the crime lapsed under the statute of limitations before his appeal could be heard.”
The greed and corruption of the Roman Curia has been common knowledge since the days of Dante and Luther, when the Vatican earned its name the “Whore of Babylon.” The 1970s and 1980s were marked by interminable scandals over the Vatican’s connections to the P2 Masonic Lodge, South American military regimes, crooked bankers like Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, and organized crime. Thus, nobody will be surprised by what Avarizia and Via Crucis bring to light. Nevertheless, it is always good to see that from time to time someone reminds people of the real face behind the Vatican’s hypocritical mask.
The Vatican tribunal did not question the veracity of the writers’ assertions. Rather, the journalists have been accused of “divulging confidential information,” which the Vatican considers a “crime against the fatherland,” punishable by four to eight years in jail. Nuzzi described the first hearing as “a medieval procedure—crazy, absurd, Kafkaesque.” The accused were not charged with any specific facts to be proven; they were not shown the procedural documentation until just a few hours before the hearing; and they were not allowed to use their own lawyers but were instead forced to choose attorneys officially registered with the Vatican court.
One might think the clock had turned back to 1864, when Pope Pius IX (known as “Pope Pig” by Romans at the time, but beatified by the Vatican in 2000) issued his Encyclical against communism, socialism, civil marriage, freedom of religion, the right to public schools, and decreed that it was “insanity” to believe that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way” (“Condemning Current Errors,” 8 December 1864).
But it is 2016. The instigator of the trial is Jorge Mario Bergoglio (alias Pope Francis), monarch of the Vatican state with full legislative, executive and judicial powers. The aim is to silence the Vatican whistle-blowers as well as the journalists who published their testimonies.
We demand: Drop all charges against Nuzzi, Fittipaldi and their sources! We oppose the fact that the Catholic church arrogates the right to bring anyone to trial, especially journalists who shed light on the Vatican’s shady business.
Abolish the Concordat! Rescind the Lateran Treaty!
The Italian government endorsed the Vatican’s trial of the journalists, declaring through its mouthpiece, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano: “The Vatican has its own judicial system—one must never forget that in this kind of situation, the rules of international rights prevail.” What international rights? The Lateran Treaty of 1929, introduced under Mussolini’s fascist regime, granted the Catholic church sovereignty over a 44 hectare [109 acre] enclave in central Rome. This maneuver gave the church rights of extraterritoriality, countless privileges inside public Italian institutions, Catholic indoctrination in public schools and hefty funding masked as “international” prerogatives. But the fact that the Roman Catholic church can claim the right to arrest its employees and try journalists is one more example of the reactionary interpenetration of the Catholic church and the Italian capitalist state.
As for the judicial order of the Vatican, it is nothing but garbage left over from the Middle Ages. The Vatican still has a “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which, as the Vatican website says, “Founded in 1542 by Pope Paul III...was originally called the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition as its duty was to defend the Church from heresy.” For centuries, the Inquisition was the means by which “heretics,” Jews, Muslims, etc., were condemned to horrific torture, jail and death. To cite another example: the President of the Court of Vatican City, who sent Nuzzi and Fittipaldi to trial, is none other than Count Giuseppe Dalla Torre del Tempio di Sanguinetto, Lieutenant-General and Knight of the Grand Cross of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, founded in 1099 by Goffredo di Buglione during the First Crusade...yet this “court” is legally recognized by the Italian Republic “founded in the Resistance.” Amen.
At issue is not simply defending freedom of the press from clerical meddling, but fighting for the abolition of all privileges that the Italian state grants the Catholic church.
Marxism is a materialist and atheist worldview and hostile to all religions. All churches, whatever they may be, are instruments of bourgeois reaction to defend exploitation and to drug the working class. We uphold the ideals of freedom expounded by the Enlightenment. We Marxists fight for the democratic principle of equality of citizens—which demands that religious beliefs be viewed as a private matter. If someone wants to worship Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Satan, or Otelma the Wizard [an Italian TV personality], they should be able to do so without government interference, but also without any state support. We do not want religion of any kind to determine public policies or be imposed in schools. This is the meaning of the separation of church and state.
We oppose every form of persecution and oppression of all non-Catholic citizens—whether atheists or followers of other religions—particularly the one-and-a-half million Muslim immigrants and citizens who are regularly the victims of racist attacks and discrimination. For this reason, from France to Italy, we oppose government attempts to ban the Islamic headscarf or hijab in schools and public buildings. We are also opposed to laws, like those that were approved in Lombardy and are now also proposed in Veneto, to obstruct the building of mosques and other places of worship for religious minorities. (All this in a country where there is a Catholic church on every corner and where nobody bats an eye at the fact that ninety thousand nuns walk the streets in veils of their religious order.)
Pope Francis Poses Pure as the Driven Snow
Bergoglio’s ascension to the papacy was carried out to great fanfare in the media, pushed by a big chunk of the reformist and liberal left, to present him as a “progressive” reformer of the Catholic church for supposedly opening his arms to the poor, immigrants, women and homosexuals. The Advocate (an LGBT journal in the U.S.) named him its “Person of the Year” for 2013. Meanwhile in Italy, Nichi Vendola, head of the Left Ecology and Freedom Party, wrote ecstatically on Facebook: “If political life had one-millionth of Bergoglio’s capacity to listen and breathe, then it really could transform itself and the lives of those who suffer.” But has anything changed about the role of the Catholic church as a bulwark of reaction under capitalism?
In 2013, France was rocked by mass reactionary demonstrations against gay marriage, organized by Catholic forces. On January 30 of this year, Catholic bigots staged a huge “Family Day” event in Rome to try to block the parliament from introducing a law recognizing gay civil unions. The despicable role of the Catholic church was also demonstrated recently in Brazil, where the spreading Zika virus epidemic has led to a dramatic increase in newborn babies affected by microcephaly. In a country where millions of people live in abject poverty with no access to health care and where abortion is illegal except in instances involving rape, incest, encephalitis or endangerment of the mother’s life, the Zika virus has spurred demands for therapeutic abortions as an emergency measure. In response, the Catholic church in Brazil ranted against abortion and contraception and cynically preached “abstinence.”
Paradoxically, both Avarizia and Via Crucis are part of Francis of Buenos Aires’s supposed campaign of reform against corruption in the church. Fittipaldi describes the struggle underway inside the “Vatican jungle” of “discredited and voracious Italian cardinals” gathered around Cardinal Bertone vs. Bergoglio’s supporters for control of the Vatican’s two financial institutions: IOR (the Vatican bank) and APSA (Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See). This conflict reflects the tensions between the Italian ecclesiastical hierarchy, which has historically controlled the Vatican, and the Catholic church internationally, particularly in South America and Africa, where the majority of practicing Catholics are now found. To strengthen his hand, Bergoglio has resuscitated the timeworn church rhetoric that “blessed are the poor,” which resonates in the underdeveloped world, and he has launched a campaign against “corruption” in the Vatican establishment. There are several reasons for the Vatican’s new posture. On the one hand, it is an attempt to stem hemorrhaging from the church in Latin America, where tens of millions of followers (some 30 percent in Honduras and Nicaragua and 15 percent in Brazil), mainly from among the poor, have deserted Catholicism for Pentecostal or evangelical churches over the past 20 years. On the other hand, in this historical period, in which a handful of capitalist exploiters are amassing inconceivable wealth while billions live in desperate destitution, the Catholic church is trying to regain approval ratings by offering a pinch of charity and large quantities of religious opium.
As we wrote when Bergoglio first visited Cuba:
“The current Pope, the first from Latin America, has sought to carve out a progressive image through his homilies on behalf of the poor and oppressed. But, fawning statements by the PCC bureaucrats to the contrary, the face behind Francis’ mask is deeply reactionary. In his youth, Jorge Bergoglio was a member of Argentina’s right-wing, clericalist Iron Guard. He was part of the Catholic hierarchy there in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the church shored up the military junta of General Jorge Videla. The generals’ bloodsoaked regime, which was backed to the hilt by U.S. imperialism, killed or ‘disappeared’ at least 30,000 workers and leftists. A bishop or a cardinal was present at every public event or national holiday to bless the dictators.”
— “Castro Regime Welcomes Reactionary Vatican,” WV No. 1077, 30 October 2015
In the same period, the Vatican spearheaded the imperialists’ Cold War anti-Communist offensive against the Soviet Union. Selecting as Pope Karol Wojtyla [also known as John Paul II] in 1978 was a clear sign of the church’s eagerness to be in the front line of the efforts to restore capitalism in the Soviet degenerated workers state and across East Europe. The Vatican was especially instrumental in funneling enormous amounts of money to Solidarność, the Polish company “union” also financed by the CIA.
Argentina was one of the last stops on the infamous “Ratline”—the system by which the Vatican and the Red Cross, in cahoots with the Allied Occupation Forces, rescued thousands of Nazi and fascist war criminals at the end of World War II and recycled them for the fight against communism. To name just a few of the individuals who were taken to safety in Argentina via passage through Italian convents in Tirol and the Port of Genoa: Adolf Eichmann, the infamous “architect” of the Holocaust; Josef Mengele; Erich Priebke, the butcher of the Ardeatine caves massacre; and Ante Pavelic, the bloodthirsty “Duce” of the Croatian Ustasha.
The Vatican: Cancer of Italy
The existence of the Vatican, to borrow the words of revolutionary democrat Giuseppe Garibaldi, is “the cancer of Italy.” It is a medieval relic that transformed itself into a bastion of the capitalist system. The Catholic church has historically played the role of world center of social and political reaction. The struggle of the emerging bourgeois classes to forge modern nation states and political democracy was above all a struggle against the Catholic church, which was the economic and ideological center of feudalism. This was doubly true in Italy, where the church had its own state and where, to borrow another phrase by Garibaldi, “the first order of business in Italy is to shake the Vatican’s rotten catafalque, smash it to pieces and get rid of it” (Letter to Melari, 14 March 1870).
However, unlike the 1789 French Revolution, the Italian bourgeois revolution was neither radical nor democratic. By the mid 19th century, the Italian bourgeoisie was a latecomer and too weak to place itself at the head of an agrarian revolution. Like other capitalist classes in Europe following the 1848 insurrections, it feared uprisings by the proletariat or peasantry so much that it preferred to ally itself with the remnants of the aristocracy in order to hold back or suppress any movements by the peasantry or by the proletariat in the cities. The result was a non-democratic bourgeois revolution from above, devoid of the radical, democratic and popular qualities of the Great French Revolution. If on the one hand, the unification of Italy laid the basis for the development of a modern capitalist economy, clearing aside certain obsolete feudal structures and tiny absolutist states, on the other hand, it granted power to the House of Savoy monarchy. The latter was in alliance with southern Italian landowners and granted limited suffrage to a tiny stratum of the propertied elite, which comprised less than 2 percent of the population (and women were excluded). Although it eliminated papal power in secular matters and annulled many of the feudal privileges enjoyed by the clergy, the Italian state allowed the church to maintain a vital foothold—just one year after Piedmontese troops took Rome in 1870, the House of Savoy [the Italian monarchy] introduced the Law of Guarantees, conceding a small city-state with rights of extraterritoriality to the Pope in the Vatican.
While the church initially boycotted the new Italian state, it gradually abandoned this stance when it became clear to both the Vatican and the Italian capitalists that they had to unite in common cause against the rising tide of proletarian and peasant struggles that rocked Italy multiple times in the early 20th century. This process culminated in the marriage between the Catholic church and the Italian state, which was officially celebrated on 11 February 1929, when the Vatican and Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime signed the Lateran Treaty, formally ending the conflict between the Vatican and the Kingdom of Italy. What cemented the alliance between the church and fascism was the need to unite forces against the working class. Workers had taken power in Russia in 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, and their example inspired a revolutionary wave throughout Europe, including Italy’s biennio rosso of 1919-20.
The Lateran Treaty sanctioned the formation of the Vatican as a real, independent state in the center of Rome and granted the Catholic church various extraterritorial rights. The Concordat made Catholicism the official and exclusive state religion, imposed Catholic religion as the foundation of public education, and granted legal authority to religious marriages. Furthermore, the Vatican was showered with gold through the payment of hefty “reparations” for the 1870 “conquest” of Rome and through the state’s commitment to pay the salaries of priests. In exchange, the clergy enthusiastically supported fascism in all its repressive actions, imposition of racial laws, and in its imperialist adventures, from the invasion of Ethiopia to the Spanish Civil War.
By the end of WWII, the bourgeois order was discredited in the eyes of the working class and vast sections of the population. Likewise, the Catholic church was discredited for its collaboration with fascism and capital. Both were saved thanks only to the treacherous role played by the leaders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).
In the mid 1930s, following its degeneration under Stalin, the Communist International embraced the policy of the “popular front,” i.e., the alliance with a supposedly “anti-fascist” wing of the bourgeoisie. In Italy, this class collaboration was concretized toward the end of the Second World War when, instead of leading the working class to power, the PCI disarmed the partisans and became partners in a series of bourgeois governments with General [Pietro] Badoglio’s monarchists and the Christian Democracy. Part of the price paid by the Italian working class on the altar of class collaboration was the Communist Party’s support to the Catholic church as the state church. In 1947, the PCI supported the insertion of the Lateran Treaty as an integral part (Article 7) of the Italian Constitution. A few months later, in May 1947, when the immediate revolutionary wave had passed and American imperialism had begun its Cold War against the Soviet Union, the PCI was thrown out of the government. In 1949, the Vatican launched a ferociously anti-Communist campaign, including excommunicating all PCI members, voters and allies from the church.
The original theocratic formulations of the Lateran Treaty and the multifaceted ways in which the state was effectively subordinated to the church became increasingly intolerable as Italian society modernized and industrialized in the 1960s. Moreover, this industrialization was accompanied by the rise of working-class struggle, culminating in the prerevolutionary situation of the “hot autumn” of 1969. In fact, the fight for abortion rights and the right to divorce, which were won in the late 1970s, were fundamental aspects of these struggles. But once again, thanks to the class collaboration of the Communist Party, which abandoned allegiance to the Soviet degenerated workers state in the 1970s to embrace NATO and the “Historic Compromise” with the Christian Democracy, many gains were rolled back or torn up to honor the wishes of the church.
In 1984, the Concordat was formally revised and cloaked with a little verbiage such as the statement that Catholicism “is not the only religion” of the Italian state. But the substance of the Lateran Treaty remained. Indeed, some of the church’s privileges were reinforced: for example, religion is now taught in public schools starting in kindergarten. State funding of the church was multiplied and the “Eight per Thousand” tax law was introduced, enabling priests to pocket about a billion euros per year. And funding for the church doesn’t stop there. According to meticulous research by the Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR), if all tax exemptions are taken into account, the Catholic church receives an estimated nearly 6.5 billion euros each year from the state, including the state-funded wages paid to religion teachers selected by bishops, state financing of private Catholic schools, and myriad other items (icostidellachiesa.it).
In addition to this manna from the state, the church is up to its eyes in financial speculation, enormous real estate deals and business worldwide—the fruit of exploiting the poor whom the church claims it seeks to help. In Italy alone, the church is the biggest landowner and owns about 20 percent of all buildings. In 1977, a European investigation calculated that 25 percent of the city of Rome is church property. Furthermore, the church runs half of all the hospitals and health care facilities in Italy, most of them generously subsidized by the state’s national health plan. Expropriate all the Vatican’s property!
Marxism and Religion
The bourgeoisie has never fully achieved the separation of church and state in any country for the simple reason that religion plays such an important role in the survival of bourgeois rule. Capitalism has every reason to preserve and bolster feudal and prefeudal mysticisms such as Roman Catholicism and to exploit its patriarchal “values” in order to enslave the oppressed. Thanks to its deep roots in society, religion is a crucial bulwark for the family as a social institution and props up every kind of obscurantism, backwardness and social reaction to instill respect for the authority of the ruling class. All modern religions serve as instruments of capitalist reaction by defending the system of exploitation and muddling the minds of the working people.
The attitude of Marxists toward organized religion is defined by the fact that we are dialectical materialists, that is to say, irreconcilable atheists. As Lenin said:
“Social-Democracy bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism, i.e., Marxism. The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion....
“Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.”
— “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion” (13 May 1909)
But as Lenin reminds us, if the struggle against religion is the ABC of materialism, “Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way.” We know that in a class-divided society, religion exists as a comforting illusion for the tangible and often terrible suffering of real life. As Karl Marx famously said, it is “the opium of the people.” Thus, we know that religion cannot simply be abolished by decree, through propaganda, education or a “war against religion,” but only through the organization and acquisition of higher consciousness by the working class through class struggle.
To eliminate religion requires that human beings control the social (and natural) conditions of their own existence. This, in turn, requires the overthrow of capitalism through proletarian revolution that will create the possibility of building a communist society based on material abundance, a society in which social and economic forces are rationally planned by the working people and where, to the degree possible, science and technology dominate the forces of nature. The new humanity that develops in this kind of society, where social classes, national divisions, the repressive state and the suffocating institution of the nuclear family have been overcome, will have no more need for religion. The examples of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of East Europe demonstrated that high levels of atheism emerge in populations where the state stops imposing religious values and behavior.
In Italy today, there is a stark contrast between the grip of the Catholic church on political life and an increasingly secular population, most notably youth, many of whom are sick and tired of the “religion hour” [of indoctrination in public schools] and who surely do not wait for the priests to tell them whether or when to get married, how to dress, or when and with whom to have sex. Yet and still, religion continues to have a strong hold on the political views of many of these very same youth. The right wing uses religion as a chauvinistic “tradition” to agitate against the right of millions of non-Catholic immigrants to live in this country with full citizenship rights.
As for the reformist left, it has always spread the myth that no matter how horrendous, corrupt and servile the church today is to the powers that be, workers must be guided by the true spirit of Christianity—“the social doctrine of the Church.” In a recent example, during a public debate organized last November by Rifondazione Comunista secretary Ferrero and featuring the Bishop of Asti, Ferrero repeated for the umpteenth time that “Catholic social doctrine, with its insistence on the need to redistribute wealth, to limit profits, represents something positive and is a strong element of convergence in a society which glorifies the rich and blames the poor” (rifondazione.it, 16 November 2015). We will allow Karl Marx to respond:
“The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, even if with somewhat doleful grimaces.
“The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable.
“The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor’s compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of those infamies on earth.
“The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed.
“The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.
“The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.”
— “The Communism of Rheinischer Beobachter” (1847)
Rejecting the Marxist conception of nature and society, and even the idealist materialism of the Enlightenment, the reformist left has nothing to offer those who fight for a profound and radical change of reality. The Lega Trotskista d’Italia is committed to the liberation of all the oppressed from the yoke of religion. As we wrote in “Marxism and Religion” (WV No. 675, 3 October 1997):
“In order to win over a new generation to the struggle for socialism, based on a materialist conception of society, socialists must ceaselessly combat religion and other forms of idealism which look toward the supernatural, explaining that freedom from oppression lies in this world, not another.”
