From Anathema to Dialogue

Carrying on from the open-spirited tone of Pope John's encyclical Pacem in Terris, Paul VI last year set up a Vatican Secretariat for Nonbelievers to organize a dialogue with atheists, including Communists. Now, Marxist Roger Garaudy, the leading theoretician of the French Communist party, has written a book called From Anathema to Dialogue to "answer in a fraternal manner the appeal addressed to all" by Roman Catholicism. Praising it in the conservative Paris daily Le Figaro, French Novelist Franc,ois Mauriac urged his fellow Catholics to "buy this book by a Communist" and read it. German Jesuit Theologian Karl Rahner has offered to write a commentary for a German translation.

Garaudy views history with a certain kind of Europe-centered myopia. Ignoring the dynamism of Western democracy, he insists that the two major forces in the world today are Christianity and Communism, and that they must work together to prevent the destruction of mankind in nuclear war. "It would be a tragedy of history," Garaudy writes, "if their cooperation for the common construction of the future were frustrated by the weight of the past."

God in the World. How can they cooperate? Garaudy's answer is that both ideologies are becoming more humanistic. Such Christian thinkers as Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he argues, have restated the old Christian dichotomy of "either God or the world" in terms of a new "God in the world relationship." At the same time, Marxist intellectuals are abandoning their own crude "materialistic determination." Some Marxists now admit that the Christian's act of faith "bears witness to the grandeur of man." What Marxism attacked in the past was not Christians' "faith, love, aspirations and hopes," but the church's entanglement with such secular forces as capitalism or monarchical states.

The fundamental difference between Christianity and Communism now, says Garaudy, does not lie in their objectives but in their point of departure--the church starts with God, Marxism with man. Now that both are moving beyond the age of enmity, they should discuss the possibility of a common attack on problems of social injustice. The Christian aspirations for man, he insists, are shared by Communism, which "seeks to realize man's most lofty hopes. The future of man will not be constructed either against religious believers or without them. The future of man cannot be built either against the Communists or without them."

Eager for Talk. Garaudy's soothing, sophisticated view of Marx is plainly not that of Mao, but his book has not been disavowed by France's Red bosses. Nor is he the only Communist eager for dialogue. This year five leading Communists and five liberal Catholic intellectuals in Italy contributed essays to a book called The Dialogue Tested. There have been symposiums involving Marxist and Christian intellectuals at Frankfurt and Tutzing in Germany, Salzburg and Prague. None of this changes the ugly reality that the church under Communism is still persecuted; yet there is a cautious measure of hope in the fact that at least a few Marxists want to converse with Christians rather than silence them.

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