The New Communism

Extract

You have set me a very difficult problem, which my fifty years study of theology makes me chary of solving. In using the word difficult I do not mean the difficulty of gathering from your long letter with its many anxious repetitions the few points of uncertainty which you wish me to solve. My main difficulty after having gathered the heads of your difficulties is to solve the few difficulties which I have gathered.

Of course I know that you are not a Communist. I know this in spite of the wide-spread opinion that you are a Communist in mind and heart, though not in name. I know that what men and some of your fellow Priests take to be your Communism is your quite rational conviction that many of the alleged refutations of Communism do not refute. Of course you are too good a logician to think that you have proved a man’s opinion to be false merely by showing that the arguments for that opinion are false. A man may bring up wrong arguments to prove that the earth is round. But to show that his arguments are not true does not prove that the world is not round. Hence your refutation of the refutations of Communism does not prove that Communism is right. But still less does your refutation of the common refutations of Communism prove that you are, what many hold you to be—a Communist.