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| Leo Riding the German Machine |
The path of this utopia, wrote Furet, “is more mysterious than the real history of communism.” Its spread throughout the world was in fact much more widespread than that of Communist power. However, the disappearance of so-called 'Real Socialism' meant the loss of credibility of the historical promise, and therefore its end, because communism ceased to appear as the bright future of humanity. Hence the title of Furet's book: The Past of an Illusion.
Can we say, however, that the past of illusion is truly past? Compared to the twentieth century, despite lacking a unified center such as the USSR, Communism survives as a system of power, albeit with different variations, in China, Russia, North Korea, and Cuba. But what survives above all is the Communist idea, in a geopolitical space much larger than that expressed by the regimes that embody it. Even in societies that do not identify with Communist political systems, there persists an ideological atmosphere that refers, rather than to illusion, to what could be defined as the fundamental error of Communism. The term illusion refers to a deceptive but sometimes noble dream, destined to be shattered by reality. The error, on the other hand, is the perseverance of a mistaken idea even when reality disproves it. Illusion is animated by the hope for an ideal society that belongs to the future, while error is driven by a revolt against the reality of the present.
The communist society, as described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1848), is an egalitarian and classless society. It, explains Nikolai Bukharin in The ABC of Communism (1919), “will eliminate the division of men into classes, rich and poor, dominant and dominated.” This materialist and egalitarian conception is clearly a utopia.
However, the Communist error lies not so much in its proposal for a positive model of society, but in its stubborn denial of any form of inequality in all social relationships: rulers and ruled, parents and children, men and women, and so on. Today, this egalitarianism is intertwined with other narratives: ecological, feminist, pacifist, anti-colonialist, anti-Western, and “woke.” Communism has ceased to be a teleology of history and has become the voice of a radical protest against all order, authority, and difference, both natural and social.
Igor Safarevic has shown how the origins of Communism date back to medieval and Protestant heresies, such as the Cathars, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Anabaptists, and the sects of the English Revolution (Socialism as a World Historical Phenomenon, La Casa di Matriona, Milan 1980). Marxism transferred the egalitarian demands of these movements to the political horizon, presenting itself as a “secular religion,” a formula which, according to authors such as Eric Voegelin and Augusto Del Noce, expresses the immanentization of Christian eschatological tension.
Today, however, we are witnessing the transposition of these errors from the political sphere to the ecclesiastical sphere, in the form of egalitarian “synodality,” which, reversing the expression “secular religion,” could be defined as “religious secularism.” It is no longer religious tension that is absorbed by politics, but political egalitarianism that is absorbed by the new progressive religion.
Synodal ideology, of course, has nothing to do with the ancient and venerable synods of the Church, nor with a legitimate form of collaboration between the Pope and the cardinals and bishops through consultative bodies such as the consistory and synods. The synodal process inaugurated by the German bishops in 2019 (Synodaler Weg) and theorized by ultra-progressive theology, should instead be understood as an instrument of democratization of the Church, to transform its monarchical and hierarchical constitution into an egalitarian structure in which the Pope and the ecclesiastical hierarchies are emptied of their power, which is transferred to local communities.
The new paradigm is based on the idea of the church as a voluntary community of believers (believer's church), defined on the basis of a covenant between equals. According to this model, the original equality of the members precedes the institution, and legitimacy arises from the will of the social body itself. Communism applies this voluntaristic logic to the political and economic order; synodality applies it to the ecclesial order, reinterpreting the Church as a covenantal community of equals rather than as a hierarchical institution of divine foundation. In the synodal conception, ecclesial authority is not understood as a power that descends from Christ through an unbroken chain of hierarchical succession, but as a mandate that emerges from the consensus of the community of the faithful, gathered in a permanent and deliberative assembly.
This egalitarian conception, before being formulated by the Protestant sects, was already implicit in the theses of Marsilio da Padova condemned by John XXII in the bull Licet iuxta doctrinam of October 23, 1327. According to the theses of Marsilio and John of Jandun, authority in the Church does not reside in the Pope, but in the community of the faithful (universitas fidelium), without any superiority between clergy and laity, because all the faithful are fundamentally equal.
Against these “sons of Belial,” the Church has defined that: “it is heretical, erroneous, and contrary to Sacred Scripture” to assert that “all the faithful are equal in power and spiritual authority,” and that “there is no difference between priests and laypeople except according to a human office.” (J.V. Lograsso, Ecclesiae et Status fontes selecti, Gregoriana, Rome 1952, pp. 228-234).
The German Bishops' Conference has convened itself to lead a “synodal path,” which aims to extend to the universal Church the ‘binding’ decisions of their “permanent synod,” including the equalization of clergy and laity, the ministerial ordination of women, the inclusion of homosexuals in the Church, opening all the sacraments to them, including marriage (Julio Loredo, José Antonio Ureta, Processo sinodale; un vaso di Pandora? [Synodal Process: A Pandora's Box?], with a preface by His Eminence Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, Associazione Tradizione, Famiglia e Proprietà, Milan 2023). The errors of Communist egalitarianism thus continue to spread throughout the world.
