WOW!!! Is it ignorance, or is it anti-Catholic bigotry?
The advanced modern capitalism developed mainly at the most important schools of Economy, the Austrian School with Von Mises, Frederick Hayek and its followers, and in the U.S., at the School of Economy of Chicago with Milton Fridman, Gary Beck and other luminaires whose ideas brought forward so much progress and freedom around the world.
It is a recognized fact that the prehistory of the Austrian School of economics can be found in the works of the Spanish scholastics, theologians, and economists at the University of Salamanca, in medieval Spain. These scholastics, mainly Dominicans and Jesuits, articulated the thesis that became the roots of the Austrian School (in fact, a truly Spanish School). At the same time, the father Francisco de Vitoria, also of the University of Salamanca, developed the basis for Modern International Law.
It is an historical fact that Jews were the pioneers and founders of socialism, as it is another historical fact that the Catholic Church was the first and only to oppose and condemn Communism and National Socialism since the very beginning of both socialist aberrations.
While the Duke of Windsor embraced Hitler, and also British Prime Minister Lloyd George , referred to him as the “greatest living German, the Catholic Church confronted Nazism at the ballot booth and later, on March 14th, 1937, Pope Pius XI published the encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge”, a frontal condemnation of National Socialism.
The Encyclical exhorted that Catholics must never be anti-Semitic because “we are all Semites spiritually” and ought to hold the Jewish people in high regard accordingly. The Encyclical exposed to the world the III Reich’s persecution of the Catholic Church as well as the incompatibility between the principles of National Socialism and those of the Catholic faith.
The German government prohibited the entrance of the Encyclical into the country and it became necessary to smuggle it into Germany under the nose of the ruthless Gestapo. On Sunday March 21, The Encyclical was read from 12,000 Catholic pulpits across Germany. As a result, the Nazi’s campaign of innuendoes against The Church as well as the persecution of Catholics worsened.
On March 19, Pius XI published the Encyclical “Divini Redemptoris”. It was a most comprehensive and devastating condemnation of Communism as “intrinsically perverse.” Already Pius IX, as early as 1846, pronounced in the Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” a solemn condemnation of Communism “that infamous doctrine which is absolutely contrary to natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the rights, the property and possessions of all men, and even society itself.”
Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclical “Quod apostolici muneri,” defined communism as “the fatal plague that insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin.”
Pius XI and Pius XII were highly active, energetic, and zealous opponents of totalitarianism and oppression in every form, believing that National Socialism and Communism were both intrinsically evil.
It is true that there have been dangerous infiltrations of Marxism from the 1970’s through the so called liberation theology, but the Church fought against that evil and tried to eradicate it, this is not so in many of the protestant churches that accept the Marxist infiltration as they accepted the Nazis control in Germany
The struggle of the Church against the Marxist liberation theology was in stark contrast with the successful communist and soviet infiltration of the State Department since FDR’s administration and also of most of our Universities and the media with complete complacence of the people and the authorities.
Farther than “feeling guilty”, Catholic intellectuals, missionaries, and the Spanish Crown should be proud of their legacy in America, in addition to bringing the Gospel, culturally speaking, Spain gave the very best to America. Spain founded 23 universities (the first, the University of San Marcos, Lima, 1551) and colleges in colonial America, graduating 150,000 (including the poor, mestizos, and some Negroes) something without parallel in history.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the great German scholar and naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt, after traveling throughout the American Continent, wrote a four-volume treatise titled “Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain” which was published in London in 1811. In this work he attested to the riches of the Indians which they preserved throughout the 300 years of Spanish rule.
The famous protestant and liberal minded humanist, witnessed the scientific progress of Hispanic America and praised it’s greatest accomplishments in the study of Natural Sciences that had been defrayed by the Crown.
After visiting Mexico in 1803, Humboldt maintained: “No city of the New Continent Alexander von, not even excepting those of the United States, can display such great and solid scientific establishments as the capital of Mexico. The capital and several other cities have scientific establishments, which will bear a comparison with those of Europe... Instruction is communicated gratis at the Academy of Fine Arts and hundreds of young students without consideration of rank, color, and race, were confounded; we see the Indian and the Mestizo sitting beside the white, and the son of a poor artisan in emulation with the children of the great lords of the country...No European government has sacrificed greater sums to advance the knowledge of the vegetal kingdom than the Spanish government...All these researches have not only enriched science with more than four thousand of new species of plants, but have also contributed to diffuse a taste for natural history among the inhabitants of the country.”
In Hispanic America, three hundred years before public education would reach the United States; a system of schools, colleges, and universities were founded in what would become the first public educational system in the New World and was wholly supported by the Crown of Spain. Some of these schools had as many as 800 to 1000 students and at these schools one would find the children of the Spaniards and the Indians in the same classrooms. In 1531 there were more than 10,000 Indian students in the schools of New Spain.
The first school for girls in the New World was founded in 1548 by the first archbishop of Mexico City, Juan de Zumárraga. Bishop Zumárraga was described as “an apostle, poor, humble, wise, prudent, educated, charitable, a mortal enemy of superstition and tyranny, an indefatigable propagator of the true doctrine of Jesus Christ, a protector of the helpless, a benefactor of the people, materially as well as morally...he founded hospitals, established schools for native boys and girls, and as the editor of many important works for the education of the Indians, he was very liberal minded.”
(Myth and Reality: The Legacy of Spain in America)
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We should be aware that the evils of Marxism may enter in periods of hibernation and we should be ready to confront them with the Gospel and the Truth. With Pope Francis we are witnessing a resurgence of liberation theology, a fact that Catholics should expose and meet head-on.