So I Hear Pope Francis is a Communist. Really?

Today I was poking through the news and spotted this article on the BBC,  Is the Pope a communist?. I about spat out my coffee in laughter.   Of course, it wouldn't be the first time that I'd seen the allegations of being a communist get launched at the Pope.  In fact, that seems to be the primary insult thrown at the man and Ed Stourton, the author of the article, makes sure to peg one of those source of the diatribe as being Rush Limbaugh.  What a surprise.  What I find interesting though is that does seem like a lot of people, based on comments left on news articles, Youtube videos and more, immediately jump to the conclusion that the Pope is, in fact, a communist.  It was just so surprising to see it on the BBC's own website as an article posing that question and maybe all that commentary is precisely why they chose to open up a dialogue about that question.  Stourton does a pretty good and fair assessment of the question, coming to the eventual conclusion that no, the Pope isn't a communist.  However, he's a Roman Catholic.  Is he really going to speak out against the Pope?

As an atheist, I don't see the Pope as being a dirty Marxist either.  I see him pretty much saying things like they are in his recent encyclical.  Do I agree with everything he wrote in it?  For the most part though there are some points that I do disagree with as is to be expected considering I'm an atheist and the Pope is clearly not.  What Pope Francis did, however, to encourage the wrath of the likes of individuals such as Rush Limbaugh, was to dare criticize capitalism, itself.   My goodness, what a grievous sin.

Here's the thing though--even in capitalism's greatest bastion, the United States, we've acknowledged time and time again where capitalism has failed.  We acknowledged it way back when it was decided that the Department of Education should be formed.  We realized that maybe capitalism when applied to roads wasn't such a good idea and centralized the creation and maintenance of those as public services.  In fact, almost every one of the public services that we have today came about simply because capitalism wasn't quite cutting it for those things.   Some of these things are controlled by local city governments, counties, states, and yet others are federalized.  Our history is peppered with times that capitalism didn't work.

Now, I'm sure that some reading at this point might say "OMG She's a communist!" but they'd be about as correct as anyone saying that Pope Francis is because he made observations and criticisms about the plight that many across the globe are in as a consequence of consumerism and, well, capitalism.  The big issue, as I see it, is that we have this extraordinary penchant in this country to view anyone who criticizes--even correctly--capitalism as being a communist.  That kind of sounds like having a belief or behavior involving uncritical zeal or with an obsessive enthusiasm and that's the definition of fanaticism.  (Thanks, Wiki)

Usually when one thinks of fanatics, the first things that may jump to mind are religious fanatics or those crazy Apple consumers who may very well eventually change their names to having an "i" before it to express their adoration of the company's products even more clearly to the general public at large.  (Just kidding, Apple lovers--maybe! ;) )  The less frequently considered form of fanaticism is probably the most common though--political ideology.  Why it's so prevalent isn't that hard to figure.  A country requires some degree of agreement amongst its populace as to what they view as the general "best practices" for the country itself and that can easily lead to fanaticism about that ideology and a lot of allegations that aren't necessarily true when more thoroughly examined.  You can find ideological or political fanatics in any group anywhere.   We're just as guilty of that here in the US as the guy who believes in the unfailing excellence of Communism in China.   It goes both ways and both really are bad.

In my blog post From Russia With Love,  I talked about my experiences when I was given an unexpected and unbeknownst to the Russian government tour of Moscow to see the contrasting lifestyles of the officials and the average Russian, the long toilet paper lines, and more before the fall of the Iron Curtain..  In exchange for her time, I gave the girl, Maria, two rolls of toilet paper and she regarded them like I had just dropped $1000 in her lap.  It was that bad but did people complain?  No.  Maria admitted that she felt uneasy and at risk by stating her complaints about the failings of her government and its favored ideology because she didn't know who was going to hear her say such negative things and turn her in.   While we don't do that here in the US, we still cushion our criticisms of capitalism and other entities that may have earned (or not) our ire for fear of societal condemnation.  We may not get a physical Gulag like Maria but boy, we can get a social gulag for saying that capitalism is failing.  That's bad because we need to be able to objectively examine, converse and feel free to criticize prevailing ideologies that may not be working and worse yet, bringing us into dire straits.  When we don't do that, we are not seeking out ways to correct those problems and make a better system.  Doing such things worked in the past with our roads and more but then again, it's only been the last 167 years of this nation's history that we've had a formidable opponent to our own prevailing ideology.

The greatest irony of them all is that I openly criticize the failings of capitalism and did so all throughout earning my degree at PSU's School of Business Administration.  In fact, when it came time for me to write my final paper ever for the School of Business, I chose not to sing the praises of capitalism in order to please my prof but instead, launched a tirade of well researched condemnations at those in my own field and went so far as to say this:

If capitalism as a system appears to the general public to be drunk on greed, as protesters frequently state, then it is the accounting professionals who act as the enablers by providing the bottle from which capitalism drinks. Professionalism and Accounting in the 21st Century

My professor, though this was his field that he'd been working in for 30+ years, didn't call me a dirty Marxist or a communist because I had the gall to criticize everything.  Instead, he gave me an A+.  Not every dirty capitalist thinks Pope Francis is a communist.  Not even an atheist one.  He's just stating the obvious.  We're screwing up.