Communism, Confession and Our Souls

Communism, Confession and Our Souls

Why am I thinking about Communism in this first Sunday in February, 2024?

Because it’s all around us, headlines and exhortations shouted out by the American elite. And it’s been so for years. Progressive ideology is merely Marxist rhetoric. Sure it’s cool, 21st-century name, woke, provides a cloak, but it’s transparent–if we open our eyes.

Historically, anti-semitism and communism are closely affiliated. But its existence right here in River City, US has been hidden, until now. The recent appalling anti-semitic riots on US campuses have revealed the Marxist, atheistic ideology of a majority of university faculty members. One that is overtly or subtly broadcasted to American college students.

“Antisemitism isn’t new among intellectuals nor is it surprising. By their very existence, the Jewish people call up a God who spoke to Abraham, Moses and a Bible that predicted the state of Israel. Pundits securely enthroned on their secular humanistic tautology get itchy at the notion of the chosen people. It offends their sense of equality. Antisemitism is a spiritual evil, as is much of the deranged, absurdly called ‘progressive,’ agenda.

A few years ago, a book about the resurgence of socialism and communism caught my attention. Kristian Niemitz’s explanation made sense: prior attempts at socialism weren’t real. Or although history is replete with failed socialistic governments, we Americans “can do it right.” His is an excellent analysis into why so many embrace a socialism that’s indistinguishable from Communism.

But it’s inadequate.

Peace of soul

“It is the basic principle of Marixism that any attempt to reconcile capital and labor so that they both cooperate in prosperity and peace is a betrayal of communism.”

Fulton J Sheen

Penned in his1949 book, Peace of Soul. Archbishop Sheen’s pithy phrase explains the current animosity toward capitalism among–seemingly everyone. Especially billionaires, and millennials.

Fulton Sheen’s popularity in America was unparalleled. In 1930, he started a radio program that grew to over four million listeners. In 1951, he turned to television with his Sunday night show, Life is Worth Living. Although neither of my parents was Catholic, they seldom missed an episode. And if we take the time to listen to one of the talks, like the one below, we understand his popularity among Catholic and non-Catholics alike. In this episode, Quo Vadis, America? Archbishop Sheen lucidly described a country and its citizenry headed for a precipice.

Frustrated souls

Just so, Sheen’s book, Peace of Soul-I’ve embedded a link to a free PDF- begins with that same piercing and disquieting insight. He writes:

UNLESS souls are saved, nothing is saved; there can be no world peace unless there is soul peace. World wars are only projections of the conflicts waged inside the souls of modem men, for nothing happens in the external world that has not first happened within a soul…If the frustrated soul is educated, it has a smattering of uncorrelated bits of information with no unifying philosophy.

Then the frustrated soul may say to itself: ‘1 sometimes think there are two of me — a living soul and a Ph.D.’…Such a man projects his own mental confusion to the outside world and concludes that, since he knows no truth, nobody can know it. His own skepticism (which he universalizes into a philosophy of life) throws him back more and more upon those powers lurking in the dark, dank caverns of his unconsciousness. He changes his philosophy as he changes his clothes. On Monday, he lays down the tracks of materialism; on Tuesday, he reads a best seller, pulls up the old tracks, and lays the new tracks of an idealist; on Wednesday, his new roadway is Communistic; on Thursday, the new rails of Liberalism are laid; on Friday, he hears a broadcast and decides to travel on Freudian tracks…

Peace of Soul

In the 300 plus page book, Sheen analyzes the inimical effects of psychiatry and psychology upon the souls of modern men and women; explaining as he goes, just how destructive was Freud’s total annihilation of conscience, sin and moral responsibility.

Confession–and religion

It’s more than strange when just the perfect book falls into our laps, like Jung’s Modern Man in Search of A Soul. Jung’s book affected me so profoundly that I included it in my first novel.

It had taken Lindsey just two days to read Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

“She had enjoyed the book so much that she had read it twice, the second time slowly, enjoying the thoughts of the man who had begun his career as a protégé of Freud, but who had diverged from the Freudian school of psychiatry after only six years with his brilliant but tortured mentor. Lindsey reflected on the many surprises she had found in the book: Jung’s nomenclature, for example. He was emphatic about the essential aspect of the confessional stage of the psychoanalytic process for the therapist and patient to establish a therapeutic relationship.

“Confession: the word had seemed to proclaim itself to her as she had read and then reread sections of his book. The power of the word itself and of Jung’s conviction that the physician psychiatrist could not be of assistance to anyone past the age of thirty-five—for Jung, the onset of middle age—without the aid of some religious belief on the part of the patient, reverberated in her heart. She wondered if Jung’s theories were perceived as radical when he wrote what would be the last book of his life? Radical indeed seemed an appropriate description in the contemporary age of psychiatry, one that predominantly relies on medication—the chemical cure.”

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