Keys of This Blood (44 page)

The flood tide of secularism was not all legalistic and legislative, however. As time went on, the academic faculties of Europe and America, already proud of their position in the vanguard of liberal and forward-looking political thinking, took like ducks to the rising tide of Marxist interpretations of history, law, religion and scientific inquiry. The complexion of education in everything from genetics to sociology and psychology became decidedly, and often exclusively, materialistic.

Everything now seemed to proceed on the principle that all the puzzles of humankind and all the problems of human life had to be solved without any admixture of the transcendent. All the meaning of human life and the answer to every human hope were contained within the boundaries of the visible, tangible, material world of the here and now.

As John Paul II settled into the Apostolic Palace in Rome as successor to Paul VI and the short-lived John Paul I—by the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s—the many and varied streams of materialist influence had already broken over their banks and flooded into the general
landscape of Western culture. Everything seemed to coalesce in Gramsci's favor.

Christian-Marxist dialogues and conventions were everywhere. The influence of the unequivocally Marxist and pro-Soviet World Council of Churches went through the roof. Traditional principles of education collapsed in Catholic schools, from primary through university levels. The refusal of Western bishops to insist on obedience of the faithful to Church laws about divorce, abortion, contraception and homosexuality became the norm, not the exception. Everywhere, in fact, there was a massive lethal thrust, on Antonio Gramsci's terms, at the Catholic and Christian culture of the West nations.

By the time John Paul II came to the papacy, in fact, it was no longer even a secret that echelons of clerics in the Vatican itself had been deeply affected. Indeed, perhaps the profoundest victory of the Gramscian process was visible primarily in the mind-boggling confusion, ambiguity and fluidity that was already the hallmark of Rome's reaction to the rapid de-Catholicizing of the Church, as well as of Vatican dealings with bishops who sometimes openly declared their independence from papal authority. To a large degree, papal and Vatican control had been effectively removed from the georeligious machinery of the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope John Paul did not arrive from Poland unaware. He understood better than most what had happened to his Church in the West. He was, in fact, probably the only major non-Communist world leader who knew the contribution Antonio Gramsci had made to operational Marxism around the world, and who understood both the murky process he had advocated and the Leninist machinery in which that process was now enshrined.

Nevertheless, if John Paul had hoped that in his five papal trips to Latin America, he could put a dent in the allegiance of his clergy there to Liberation Theology, or that he could recall his bishops and his religious orders in the region to their vows of obedience, he was disappointed in those hopes. No papal exhortations in public or in private, and no directives by his Vatican, made the slightest substantial difference in the situation there.

Indeed, by 1987, the pro-Soviet and violence-prone Base Communities in Latin America alone numbered over 600,000. By comparison, there were not even 1,000 Roman Catholic dioceses in North and South America combined—and virtually all of those were at least questionable in their allegiance to Rome.

Finally, even in such countries of the Catholic heartland as Italy and
Spain, there was nothing to stand in the way of the legalization of divorce and the liberalization of all Christian-based laws and moral constraints, including the most basic and personal ones concerning family, sexuality and pornography.

Inevitably, as the 1980s progressed, non-Marxist streams of influence were increasingly and ever more rapidly affected by Gramscian penetration and cooperation. The “liberalized” culture of the West nations essentially converged with the process of mounting secularization, sharing freely and solidly in the new sacred principle that all the life, activities and hopes of mankind rested on the solid structures of this world alone.

Professionally secular systems of belief—Humanism, Mega-Religion and the grab bag of New Age, for example—forged their own not-so-strange alliances with Gramsci's heirs, rushing into the religious vacuum of formerly Christian societies. For they, too, were united in insisting on the major proposition that religion and religious faith had no function except to help all mankind to unite and be at peace within this world, in order to reach its ultimate peak of human development.

In the same decade of the eighties, a new bent of mind surfaced within virtually all of the merging secularist streams of activity in the West. Globalism.

The generality of thinking people throughout the West nations—entrepreneurs, academicians, politicians, artists, media people, industrialists, scientists—all inclined themselves toward the concept that the whole society of nations should and could be forged into a unity, into one great society, secular to the marrow of its bones, rejecting all the old religious divisiveness, spurning all of religion's old and outworn claims of otherworldly ambitions and purposes.

By the beginning of the 1990s, the Gramscian process in the West had been fused seamlessly, like molten glass, into the most important energies and impulses of the new culture prevailing in democratic capitalist societies.

Within what was still called Catholicism, the word “Roman” was frequently dropped; Roman Catholicism was not a concept that was compatible with secular globalism, after all. Within “Modern Catholicism,” as it called itself, a large majority of bishops, priests, religious and laity had adopted all the traits of the new culture that surrounded them. They had ceased to be Catholic in any sense that would have been recognized by Pope John XXIII as he summoned his Second Vatican Council to “open the windows” of his Church to the world in the search for its renewal—its
aggiornamento
.

The mental deception of so many millions of Catholics by a thoroughly this-worldly, materialistic and un-Catholic persuasion was matched only by the intellectual darkening into which the cultural elites of the West had worked themselves. Gramsci's ghost had captivated them all into his “Marxist hegemony of the mind.”

The transcendental had bowed to the immanent. Total materialism was freely, peacefully and agreeably adopted everywhere in the name of man's dignity and rights, in the name of man's autonomy and freedom from outside constraints. Above all, as Gramsci had planned, this was done in the name of freedom from the laws and constraints of Christianity.

To tell anyone in the West—any of the participants in the entrepreneurial activities of America and Europe, anyone in the Western media, anyone in the scientific community or in the academic faculties of colleges and universities—that all of them, along with the leading theologians and Church dignitaries the world over, had been thoroughly grounded in the basic principles of Marxism would be to elicit hoots of derision and self-righteous cries of protest. Pope John Paul's answer to such hoots and cries, however, is to point to Gramsci's ghost, which has thoroughly penetrated all of these groups with the Communist revolutionary sense of immanence.

Many who would reject this claim by John Paul point in their turn to the social democracies that flourish in the Scandinavian countries. Surely, Marxism cannot be said to flourish in such areas—not even so unbloody a brand of Marxism as Gramsci's. After all, in Sweden, in Norway, in Denmark, there has been a revulsion from the Marxist oppression of liberty. And in all of them there flourishes a large bourgeois class with no liking for Marxist economic weaknesses and no inclination to renounce either capitalism or the material comforts it brings.

John Paul's answer to any such finger-pointing is that it misses the whole subtle attack of Gramsci's ingeniously congenial process. In fact, argues the Pontiff, to make this argument is in itself to cooperate with the most central operating principle of Leninist Marxism: deception.

The Pope readily concedes that the Nordic model of social democracy in Norway, Sweden and Denmark has produced a comfortable way of life, a way of life ingrained with values of moderation, egalitarianism and social solidarity, a way of life bolstered by hefty social benefits, a way of life in which there is a virtual absence of ostentatious wealth, but in which living standards hover near the top of the international scale.

Nevertheless, as John Paul understands to his pain, the model social
democracies in these countries rest upon a way of life that is in no way concerned with any value transcending the here and now. All public values are immanent. In a private conversation with one of his American counterparts, a Swedish book publisher remarked that “Sweden is a small and godless country.” Pope John Paul would extend that observation with equal accuracy to Sweden's Nordic partners in social democracy.

In their efforts to join in some degree of economic unity with the Europe of 1992, meanwhile, the Nordic administrations have a tough time of it. It is hard for them to place a cap on public-sector expenses; or to step up national productivity; or to allow private enterprises a freer rein. For to do any of that would jigger the national consensus in their own countries. And this is a consensus that rests exclusively on the “value” of material comfort.

In Pope John Paul's reading, the crux of the matter in the Nordic countries is not all that different from that in the rest of the West nations, including the United States. In every case, national culture was developed on the basis of Christian beliefs and Christian moral laws. Indeed, the Pontiff argues from history, those beliefs and laws gave each nation its resiliency, its courage and its inspiration. In sum, as Gramsci realized, Christianity was both the philosophy and the lifeblood of the Western culture shared by all of the nations in question.

By the end of the 1980s, however, there was no longer even any serious talk of Christian beliefs or Christian moral laws. If they entered into the great dialogues of the day, they were reduced to “values,” like any other coinage that existed for the sole purpose of being bargained away for something else.

George Orwell once wrote that “at any given moment, there is a sort of all-pervading orthodoxy—a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact.”

For John Paul's money, the “all-pervading orthodoxy” in the West in the final decade of the twentieth century is a tacit agreement not to discuss the “large and uncomfortable fact” that Western leaders and populations, in their public consensus, have abandoned the Christian philosophy of human life.

In fact, according to Pope John Paul's analysis of Western culture at the present moment, there is no philosophy of life worthy of the name. What now passes for philosophy is nothing more than a hybrid complex of fashions and vogues and impulses and theories that mold public opinion, that guide public education and that dominate artistic and literary
expression throughout the West. What better scenario than that could Gramsci have written into his blueprint? It is the perfect stage for his process—long since adopted by European Marxists—to promote the growth of social democracy within the society of European nations and to occupy the spaces left vacant by the bourgeois culture itself.

With their own philosophy still in place and as inflexibly based as ever on the materialistic dialectic of Marx, Gramsci's latter-day heirs have sold the free-market West on a new prize commodity: that type of immanence which is specifically Communist.

The General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Achille Occhetto, gave a little demonstration in early June of 1989 of how well the Gramscian formula works. The occasion was his pious denunciation of the CP in China for ordering the People's Liberation Army (CPA) to use tanks and automatic weapons to crush the student protest on the streets of Beijing a few weeks before.

“In the East [China],” Occhetto declared without even a wink at the bloody history of Marxism, “Communism is a term that has no relation any longer to its historic origins and constitutes a political framework that is completely wrong.” Then, in the great deception demanded by Gramsci's policy, Occhetto proclaimed, “There is absolutely nothing left of Communism as a unitary and organic system.” To illustrate the point, in fact, Occhetto and his comrades in the Italian CP went on to organize public demonstrations of their solidarity with the doomed student-led democratic movement in China.

Occhetto's words notwithstanding, his was the perfect display of Gramsci's mandate to Marxists everywhere. Take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself, Gramsci had said. Be inflexible in the materialist dialectic of Marx. Be rigid in material philosophy and unbending in the Marxist interpretation of history. But be clever as you do it. Ally all of that with any forces that present an opening for Marxist immanentism.

Obediently, Gramscian Marxists in Europe and elsewhere fuel nationalism in Africa. But at the same time, they ally themselves with the globalism of the world's entrepreneurs and with the Europeanizers of Europe. They side with American sentiment condemning the excesses of Chinese Marxism. But they support the elements in the American Congress and administration that foster compromise with the Chinese Marxist leaders.

They join with the Christian churches in brotherly dialogue and in common humanitarian ventures. But the object is to confirm the new Christianity in its antimetaphysical and essentially atheistic pursuit of
liberation from material inconvenience, from the fear of a nuclear holocaust, from sexual restriction of any kind and, finally, from all supernatural constrictions as from all material fears. Total liberation is to construct the long-dreamed Leninist-Marxist Utopia—that is the rule.

By just that process, authored by Antonio Gramsci more than half a century ago within the dismal confines of Mussolini's prisons, has Western culture deprived itself of its lifeblood.