: :
: : : : "Communism is more than Marxism, my friend, just as Catholciism is mroe than the Roman Curia....Both Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood by like an established society, and been silent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate." : : : Graham Greene shoulda been the Pope.
: : SDF:
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedia, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and the general ground for the consummation and justification of this world. It is the ghostly realization of the human essence, ghostly because the human essence possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.: : Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
: : Karl Marx, from the "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"
: An odd follow-up, Sam, because Graham Greene in the same work tackled that same quote as well. Would you like to know what his character, the Catholic/Communist Doctor magiot, had to say?
: "I don't know where Marx said that, if he did, but since you were born a Catholic, as i was, you should be happy to know that Marx opposed the closing of the monasteries by Henry VIII. He was in favor fo religion at that stage of society. Opium, remember, has uses in medicine. It means freedom from pain, from despair, from fear. I'm not against opium. Heaven knows I'm not against Voodoo. What a sad state my people would be in if Papa Doc was the only power in the land."
: GG apparently really liked the monastery example. He cited it again when he went to the Soviet Union. At that point he said, 'There is no conflict between Catholicicms and Communism, and teh only people who think there is are a few reactionary priests. i look forward to the day when there is an alliance between the Soviet Union and the Vatican....":
In a perverse way this shows how catholic the Catholic Church can be, but the question is "at what point does the word 'catholic' lose any meaning to reality"? Can a Rabbi also be a Catholic? What was it Pope John VI said about the smoke of the Devil shortly after Vatican II?
