Question for Catholics

[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]
I am not saying the [Christian] Church has never done wrong or that the people in the Church have never done wrong. No one has or ever will assert such foolishness. The fact of these sins doesnt call the Church as an institution into doubt.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm afraid the fault lies not with the execution of the theory but with the theory itself.

There was a time when, among leftist circles, the crimes of Stalinism were not ascribed to Communism itself but to the erroneous ("grossly erroneous") application of Communist theory by Joseph Stalin. In fact, this was the position of Trotsky and other Communist dissidents (or deviationists -- choose your term). This excuse persisted for decades after WWII and came to be finally refuted only through the works of French philosophers and sociologists, starting in the 1950s. They showed that the fault (the seeds of barbarism) lie at the very heart of Marxism-Leninism. (Those guys were not capitalists. One of the main theoretical publications at the time was "Socialism or Barbarism?" The latter referred both to capitalism and Stalinism.)

Same thing with monotheistic religions and, in this case, Christianity. While no one can seriously dispute the enormous humanitarian work of the Church, or the importance of some political and social positions that the Church has supported, it remains an inhibitive factor in Man's progress towards greater knowledge, greater individual freedom, better social organisation, etc. Despite its many appearances (and disguises) as the solution, it's the religion itself that is the problem.

By the way, the structural similarities between a major monotheistic religion and Communism, if one ignores the content of the respective "teachings", are so many as to render the two belief systems nearly identical.