**Christianity, Communism and Real Hope**

“Christianity did not bring a message of social revolution like that of the ill-fated Spartacus, whose struggle led to so much bloodshed. Jesus was not Spartacus, he was not engaged in a fight for political liberation. Jesus. . . brought something totally different: an encounter with the living God and thus an encounter with a hope stronger than the sufferings of slavery, a hope which therefore transformed life from within, even if the external structures remained unchanged.” [emphasis added]

—Pope Benedict XVI, in the Papal Encyclical Saved by Hope

Benedict’s statement comes as part of a larger polemic against atheism and Marxism and, generally, against any attempt to rationally understand and radically change humanity’s conditions of oppression and—as Benedict makes very explicit in the above quote—enslavement. While being part of this general polemic, the statement cited here is also aimed in part, at least, at “liberation theology.” Liberation theology is a trend which arose inside the Catholic Church in the ’60s and ’70s. Followers of the trend formed what they called “base communities,” which often organized the masses to resist the power structure and to attempt to win reforms, and which tried to use the Bible and in particular the story and example of Jesus—instead of science and reason—as a source of inspiration and sustenance.

With the coming of John Paul II to the papacy in the late 1970s—and with the intense contention between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in Latin America, contention in which the “base communities” often found themselves at odds with U.S.-dominated regimes and, in one way or another, allied with Soviet-backed movements and insurgencies—the Church cracked down hard on this trend. Benedict was the chief theoretician justifying this crackdown, and he remains on a mission against any sort of ideas or efforts which attempt to draw on Jesus to justify struggling against oppression.

In terms of opposing enslavement and oppression, Benedict is obviously wrong—he is nothing but a highly sophisticated justifier of oppression and the status quo. And the liberation theologians, generally speaking, are on the side of the people, decrying injustice and often making great sacrifices in the struggle.

But in terms of theology and accuracy, in contrast to those who try to take the life and teachings of Jesus as a basis for some kind of “social revolution,” Benedict is actually correct—he is correct in arguing that “Jesus was not Spartacus” and more specifically that Jesus “was not engaged in a fight for political liberation.”

What Jesus actually “brought” was the illusion, or delusion, of “an encounter with the living God” and the illusory and false hope of something “stronger than the suffering of slavery,” which directs people inward, and away from transforming and abolishing the real conditions of enslavement, and which offers them nothing but the “consolation” of “a life transformed from within.” Such a life in fact will be, and can only be, a life still conditioned and continually assaulted by the real world conditions of enslavement and oppression.

This stands in sharp contrast to the need, and possibility and basis, to actually transform the real world through communist revolution—abolishing all systems and relations that enslave people, and the corresponding ideas that reinforce that enslavement, and transforming oneself, in a revolutionary way, not an illusory and ultimately reactionary way, in the process.

What Benedict offers is like telling someone who has been unjustly imprisoned in a “Supermax” prison for their entire adult life, and who is not only longing for but searching desperately for a way to break out of this imprisonment, “Well, you’re going to have to stay in here, in these horrific conditions, for the rest of your life; but here’s a way you can change yourself from within—and that’s so much more important.”

Thanks, but no thanks!!—especially when there is the possibility of actually breaking out and breaking free of all this, by uniting with others to take on and radically change—in fact to eliminate and move beyond—the “external structures,” that is, the system of exploitation and oppression that imprisons people in this society and under this system.

Benedict’s visit should be a further occasion to contrast the false hope of Jesus with the real and living hope of communism. And it should also provide a further impetus to get out broadly with Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, by Bob Avakian. There one finds a different road—a road of breaking free of superstition and mental enslavement of any kind…of understanding the world ever more sharply while fighting to transform it, and ourselves, in the process. As we said last week, this book deeply exposes the philosophical underpinnings and political role of religion—“and all this is marshaled to even more clearly bring forward the vision of a truly emancipated society—and to more sharply lay out and convey the truly emancipatory method people absolutely need to get to that society.”

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