The reality of the “communist paradise on earth” is brutal persecution and social ghettos, says the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
His Holiness Patriarch Kirill addressed the issue in his new interview with Forbes France.
Asked about altruism as “a third way between hyper-materialistic capitalism and revolutionary Marxism,” the Patriarch state firmly: “The desire for self-enrichment as the highest goal of life, as well as self-satisfied social egoism, are repugnant to the Christian worldview.”
Moreover, the quasi-religiosity ascribed to both capitalism and Marxism is equally unacceptable. For all its talk of creating a paradise on earth, communism and aggressive social justice led to something quite different, His Holiness continued:
We, who have passed the era of communism, know well that the idea of social justice, turned into an aggressive ideology, destroys everything around itself. Hundreds of thousands lawlessly executed for their faith, the creation of a social ghetto for hostile classes—this is the reality of the “communist paradise on earth.”
However, the “capitalist Gospel” of accumulation of wealth and goods at any cost is “no less dangerous,” the Patriarch says.
Any activity, including economic, must be organized on a solid moral basis, which for Christians has always been Holy Scripture and the teachings of the Church, he emphasized, though “this is resisted by powerful forces that are ready to use any means to prevent the domination of Divine ideas in the minds of our contemporaries.”
And commenting on the trend over the past half-century of consumerism being increasingly oriented towards individual, rather than familial desires and needs, His Holiness noted that in Russia and various western countries, the people are recovering the understanding that “the future of humanity is impossible without a traditional family.”