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Faith in Marx

Apparently [ht: lr], the Vatican, through first La Civiltà Cattolica (a Jesuit paper) and then L’Osservatore Romano (the official Vatican newspaper), has been rethinking Marx.

Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making.

Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, wrote in an article that Marx’s work remained especially relevant today as mankind was seeking “a new harmony” between its needs and the natural environment. He also said that Marx’s theories may help to explain the enduring issue of income inequality within capitalist societies.

“We have to ask ourselves, with Marx, whether the forms of alienation of which he spoke have their origin in the capitalist system,” Professor Sans wrote. “If money as such does not multiply on its own, how are we to explain the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few?”

This reappraisal of Marx follows on the papal encyclical Caritas in Veritate, as well as a series of other recent Vatican rehabilitations—of Galileo Galilei, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Darwin.

While intellectual life—inside and outside the university—should never be dictated by papal pronouncements, such reappraisals cannot but undermine the kinds of close-mindedness and dogmatism that bar Marxian and other “uncomfortable” ideas from critical inquiry concerning the natural and social worlds.