Soviet President Brezhnev, one of the last of the Soviet Communist dictators, hated the Catholic Church, according to conversations reported in The Wall Street Journal. Back during the Cold War Brezhnev is quoted as saying, “Sooner or later [the Church] would gag in our throats, it would suffocate us.” And, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Church, under the leadership of Pope John Paul II, ultimately did whip Communism.
I won’t deny that John Paul II had something to do with the rise of opposition to Communism in Poland, the first of the dominos to fall in the rebellion against Marxism. However, we don’t have Catholicism to thank for the demise of the Cold War.
The Cold War was ended by two things: moral assertion on the part of the United States, embodied in a military buildup under President Ronald Reagan, and the implosion of the irrational, anti-economic, anti-freedom system of Communism itself.
Religion and Communism actually have a lot in common. Each relies on faith — different types of faith, but still faith. One demands faith in a supernatural being to explain away everything, and the other demands faith in a secular system of command and control — a religion of the social rather than the supernatural. Both rely upon the ethical code of self-sacrifice: In one case sacrifice of self and rationality to the deity, in another case to the collective of society.
The Pope didn’t end Communism. Communism, through its own irrationality, ended itself.
The USA, when it grew a little bit of a moral spine for a brief period in the 1980’s, also helped in the demise of Communism. It’s a lesson to remember as now, in the twenty-first century, we face perhaps our greatest enemy yet: The apostles of faith and force, from the world of Islamic supernaturalism, who seek not to merely control us, as the Soviets wanted, but to utterly destroy us, both body and soul.