May 9, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – This past weekend was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, who is widely recognized as the architect of the most brutal and bloodthirsty philosophy ever to scar the earth: Atheistic Communism. On the occasion of this infamous event, it was my intention to write an article about the horrors of Communism, the legacy of Karl Marx, the Marxist hatred of humanity, and even his connection with secret societies.
After countless attempts to write this article, committing well over 5,000 words and three days of chasing rabbit holes and rhetorical dead ends, two things became painfully obvious to me. The first is that the bitter fruits of Marx’s ideologies are self-evident, and the second is that I am not as clever as I thought.
On the verge of abandoning my article, my wife suggested that I take a walk and pray the Rosary, and since Our Lady has never failed to help me when I ask, I knew that this was inspired advice.
It didn’t take long into my Rosary to realize that the answer to the problem of Marx was resting in the very beads I held in my hand; each of the Joyful Mysteries I had been praying was an answer provided long before Marx’s birth to his philosophy of revolution.
The First Joyful Mystery: The Annunciation
Marx’s entire philosophy is built upon the tension between two vices; greed and envy. He accuses, not entirely wrongly, the upper class of the greedy enslavement of the lower classes. But rather than address the upper class and remind them of their duties through filial love to care for those who struggle to feed their families, he appeals to the suffering of the laborers and fans the flames of envy into an all-out rage. His demagoguery is built upon vice, encouraging a class warfare that leads directly to revolution.
In the first mystery of the Rosary, we meditate on the Annunciation of the Incarnate Word, given to Our Lady by the Angel Gabriel. St. Bernard of Clairvaux explained in his homily In Praise of the Virgin Mother:
“You have heard, O Virgin, that you will conceive and bear a son; you have heard that it will not be by man but by the Holy Spirit. The angel awaits an answer; it is time for him to return to God who sent him. We too are waiting, O Lady, for your word of compassion; the sentence of condemnation weighs heavily upon us.”
It was through Our Lady’s reply, “Thy will be done,” that she answers the war of vices proclaimed by Marx. Marx announced a revolution which he claimed would be the salvation of the working class, and it was a revolution predicated on grasping at power, wealth and control for the supremacy of the state. Yet, Gabriel announced the salvation of men’s souls through the shedding of Divine blood! All of Heaven awaited her answer because without her willful consent to God’s proposal, man was doomed to the material salvation offered by the likes of Karl Marx. Through meditation on this mystery, we give thanks to Almighty God for Our Lady’s consent to bring the Savior into the world.
The Second Joyful Mystery: The Visitation
As soon as Gabriel left Our Lady, Scripture tells us that she “made haste” to be with her cousin Elizabeth, who was then in her sixth month of pregnancy. Thus filled with the Holy Spirit, and carrying the Christ in her womb, Our Lady’s first desire was to help family and serve others. She is the very model of the corporal works of Mercy.
Marx, on the other hand, proposes a system that abolishes and ridicules the service of charity and seeks to impose a heavy-handed system of a labor-fed society. In Marx’s system, there is no love of neighbor, but only the service of all under the imposing gaze of the state.
The Third Joyful Mystery: The Birth of Christ
As we contemplate the Birth of the Savior of mankind, we have in mind the image of Joseph, Mary and the infant Christ Child lying in a manger. This image alone could fill volumes of contemplative meditations. Here, we see the image of the Holy Family as an Earthly representation of the Holy Trinity; Joseph the Father, Our Lady filled with the Grace of the Holy Spirit, and Our Blessed Lord bridging the gap between Trinity and Family. But in all the various ways we could contemplate this Mystery, what remains is the image of the family.
Marx’s revolutionary manifesto asked, “What will be the influence of communist society on the family?” His answer is to abolish it by destroying its very foundations:
It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.