Why Gramsci Hated the Church

In his letters from prison, Gramsci has many notes on the Catholic Church.

He hated the Church and saw it as the only, real threat to Marxism.

Why?

Here is a mini-list of ten ideals of the professional radical. There are more:

1) The Church teaches and believes that man is not merely material, but has an immortal soul. Therefore, any political system rooted in the here and now, in the material, is not based on reality. Ergo, the Church is wrong and superstitious and Marxism is correct in promulgating materialistic principles. He hates any idea of the eternal world impinging on the material.

2) The Church is still the great influence in Italian society, albeit, by 2013, not as much as in Gramsci's day. This influence, according to Gramsci, keeps the poor under the thumb of tyrannical priests. He somehow forgets that the Church was responsible for education, hospitals, culture. However, he is not interested in Christian culture and wants the State to take over charity until it is abolished by a complete socialist system. Hey, this is happening even in America.

He hates top down rule. Except for the need to control the proletariat......

3)  He does not (I use present tense as his writings live on) believe in absolutes: morality, truth, sublime mysticism, prayer, the afterlife. How sad. To him, absolutism of any type keeps humans from progressing. This, to me, is a weakness in his thinking. No soul, no vision.

4) The Church saw, in the great Popes of the 19th Century and the condemnation of modernism, the connection between modernism and the culture wars of Gramsci. He admits that the Church is the only institution which "gets" the culture wars fomented by the communists. This is a weakness of the Church today in America and Europe. Priests and bishops do NOT see the connection between modernists heresies (do a search on my blog) and communism. Duh.

5) He wants history to be in the hands of people, not God. Our God is a God of History, the Incarnate One, Jesus Christ, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. If God creates and enters history, the hegemony of people is, well, a dead idea from the start.

6)  Gramsci truly believes in the "I will not serve" pride of the greatest fallen angel. He does not want man, generically, to serve any one. Oops, he does want people to serve the State!

7) The philosophical concept of the human is vastly different in the Teaching of the Church and communism.
The Church teaches that each individual has a personal spiritual destiny, a unique soul, and the chance to be an heir of Heaven and a son or daughter of God. The Gramscians see individuals as both, ironically, having free will and in charge of their own destiny BUT only with the tyrannical "help" of the State.

8) The Church Militant is awake and aware of any encroachment to the Kingdom of God. A Kingdom of Men cannot supplant God's work, and Gramsci can see the power of that belief. Faith of any kind is THE threat to communism. He wants to supplant one elite for another.

9) He believes that a political self-conciousness is the first step to self-consciousness. Why? This is a weak link in his thinking, as political activity is merely the extension of the human desire for control and order in their society, not in their interior life.  The interior life is superior to the exterior, but Gramsci cannot see this. OK for an aetheist....

10) He hates the strong, mass movements of the Church-Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, as threatening the independence of human beings by supposedly imposing ideals on a stupid, simple populace. He sees the power of these movements.

Well, if one does not believe in one's own eternal soul, or Heaven or Hell, or the Seen God, Christ,  Who shows us the Unseen Father, these ideas could make sense.

But, they do not . As the first premise is wrong, bad thinking, illogical.

Sadly, Gramsci's ideals have succeeded, especially among Jesuits, whom he hates. Liberation Theology is only one way this Order has collapsed into the Gramsci camp.

Read, study, pray, act...............be Catholic.