By Father Shenan J. Boquet
“The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with ‘communism’ or ‘socialism.’ She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of ‘capitalism,’ individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor.” ― Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2425
According to a Gallup poll released last month, 43 percent of Americans now say they have a positive view of socialism, the highest number Gallup has recorded since it began asking the question in 2010. Among Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 the figure is 57 percent, which means that in that age group socialism is now more popular than capitalism (43 percent).
In a way, this is not surprising. Polls show that younger people are worried about the state of the economy. Rent is increasingly out of reach, for many a house is out of the question, and groceries cost more every month. Many say they have no interest in marrying and raising a family, in part because they are worried that they can’t afford it. When a politician promises to freeze the rent and make the buses free, as New York’s new self-proclaimed socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, did last year, it can sound appealing.
And yet, for more than a century and a half, the popes have condemned socialism, consistently and insistently, in encyclical after encyclical. Pius IX did so in 1849, and so did Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. Why?
The answer is complicated. Part of the answer, which may surprise some readers, is that the Church has always understood that socialism does not actually help the poor. For a variety of reasons, it actually makes them poorer. One major reason for this is that socialism often directly targets the family, which is the one institution on which every healthy society and every healthy economy depends.
A war on the family
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels openly called for “the abolition of the family” (pp. 59). They acknowledged that “even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal,” but insisted that it is central to communism, arguing that the family is based “on capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.”
They continued:
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor (pp.59).
When the communists came to power in Russia, they put the theory into practice…fast.
Within two months of the revolution, in December 1917, church marriage was stripped of legal effect and divorce was made available on the demand of either spouse. In April 1918 inheritance was abolished outright, so that a man’s property passed on his death to the state rather than to his children. In 1920 Russia became the first country in the world to legalize abortion. That same year Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolsheviks’ leading theorist of the family, explained that “the family is withering away” because “the state does not need the family,” and that under communism “society will feed, bring up and educate the child.”
In the attack on the family, education was ground zero. If the family could not be abolished in a day, the children could at least be taken out of it for most of the day, and taught that their first loyalty was to the Party rather than to their parents. In school, children were steeped in Communist propaganda, to the point where they were encouraged to become informants against their own parents.
The Communists valorized a peasant boy named Pavlik Morozov, who, according to the official story, denounced his own father to the secret police in 1932 and was murdered for it by his relatives. He was commemorated with statues and with schools bearing his name, and in a famous painting he stands beneath a portrait of Lenin.
The Chinese Communists learned the same lesson and applied it with their own brutal thoroughness, first in the Cultural Revolution, when children were encouraged to denounce their parents and teachers, and then in the one-child policy, enforced with forced abortions and sterilizations, which I have written about many times in these columns.
The Church saw it coming
The popes saw all of this coming, long before there was a single communist government anywhere in the world.
In 1878, Pope Leo XIII warned in Quod Apostolici Muneris that the socialists “debase the natural union of man and woman, which is held sacred even among barbarous peoples; and its bond, by which the family is chiefly held together, they weaken, or even deliver up to lust.” He added, in the same sentence, that they “assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law” (no. 1).
Interestingly, in this sentence Leo actually is agreeing with the Communists that the right to own property is not primarily about wealth, but about the family. He simply takes the opposite lesson from it than the Communists. Rather than being proof that private property should be abolished, he argued that its connection to the family is evidence that the right to private property is sacrosanct.
A father and mother who own something can provide for their children without becoming dependents upon the state. Take that away, and the family becomes a ward of the government. A father, Pope Leo XIII writes in Rerum Novarum, has the duty to provide for the needs of his children, and “in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance” (no. 13).
Pius XI, writing in 1937, was blunter still. In Divini Redemptoris he described exactly what communism does to the family once it obtains power:
Refusing to human life any sacred or spiritual character, such a doctrine logically makes of marriage and the family a purely artificial and civil institution, the outcome of a specific economic system. … The care of home and children then devolves upon the collectivity. Finally, the right of education is denied to parents, for it is conceived as the exclusive prerogative of the community (no. 11).
That was written almost ninety years ago. And yet how many of the battles parents are fighting today, over what their children are taught about sex and “gender” in school, or whether they even have the right to know, for example, if their children have “come out” (identifying as being gay or transgender) come down to precisely this question of whether education belongs to parents or to “the community.”
The family is the first economy
In the midst of economic uncertainty, young people are being taught that the state will take care of them. What they are not being taught is that all the best sociological evidence conclusively demonstrates that the most effective protection against poverty ever devised is a mother and father who are married to each other.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent report on poverty in America, in 2024 just 6 percent of children living with married parents were living below the poverty line. Among children living with a single mother, the figure was almost 36 percent, i.e. six times higher.
Why should this be? An intact family is an economy in miniature. Two parents can earn, save, and plan together, and take turns caring for the children so that neither has to pay a stranger to do it. In other words, the bedrock of a healthy economy is not some grand social program, but rather strong families.
When the family breaks down, all of the quiet, unseen labor of the parents vanishes, and the only institution big enough to try to fill the void is the state. But being big and impersonal, the state tends to do so inefficiently. And then begins a vicious cycle.
Over the past 150 years, the campaign against the family has produced an unprecedented spike in divorce, a huge increase in fatherless households and poverty among single-mother homes, and huge increases in public spending on welfare. The ideology that sets out to weaken the family, in other words, ends up manufacturing the poverty it then proposes to cure.
However, there is also a deeper problem. Pope Benedict XVI identified this in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est:
The State, which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern (no. 28).
This, then, is the ultimate poverty that socialism’s war on the family produces: not a poverty of wealth, but of love.
The root of the error
St. John Paul II, who spent most of his adult life under a communist government, put it this way in Centesimus Annus in new tab): “the fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature.” Socialism, he explained, “considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism” (no. 13).
However, if a human being is merely a molecule in the social organism, then he matters only insofar as the organism finds him useful. And what happens to those who are not useful? What happens to the child in the womb, or the man with Down syndrome, or the old woman with dementia in the nursing home?
We now know the answer, beyond any reasonable doubt. The past few weeks, this column has focused on the horrific abuses that follow when euthanasia and assisted suicide are legalized. In Canada, one in every twenty deaths is now a lethal injection administered by the state. And, we now know, the pressure on the sick and elderly to “choose” the cheap and easy way is immense.
This pressure on the elderly is often heightened by the fact that many of them have few or no children to look after them. And what children they do have, often have only tenuous ties to the family (whether because of divorce, distance, or a host of other reasons), meaning that the elderly are suffering a terrible epidemic of loneliness. And so, the circle of the culture of death goes round and round.
The limits of capitalism
Before concluding, it is worth noting that the Church’s criticisms of socialism do not amount to an unqualified support for capitalism. Here, as usual, the Church avoids false dichotomies, drawing upon a deep wisdom anchored in a rich anthropology.
The same Leo XIII who rejected “community of goods” devoted much of Rerum Novarum to the sins of the employer. He wrote that “to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine,” and that to defraud a worker of his wages “is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven” (no. 20).
The Catechism, in the passage I placed at the top of this column, rejects “the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor” in the very same sentence in which it rejects socialism.
Leo XIII fully acknowledged that there are instances when publicly-funded programs are not just acceptable, but necessary. “True,” he wrote, “if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth” (no. 14).
Notice, however, where Pope Leo XIII has placed the emphasis. There is a place for the state to step in and help. But it must be helping the family, not seeking to replace it. A safety net for the family is sometimes needed or required. But a substitute for the family is not.
Pray for the young
It is fitting that our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, chose his name in honor of the pope who first took up the “social question,” as he told the cardinals two days after his election. The question is the same today as it was in 1891, and so is the Church’s answer.
The young people drifting toward socialism are not wicked. Many of them (although, the number is sadly shrinking…a topic for another column) still want what every generation before them wanted: a job, a home, a husband or a wife, and children. These are good desires. The tragedy is that they are being offered an ideology that, everywhere it has been tried, has undermined the very things they are longing for.
The Church’s answer is rooted in the idea that the family is “the original cell of social life” (CCC, no. 2207). Strengthen the family and you strengthen everything else. Weaken it, and no amount of government spending will ever fix the problem. Indeed, it is more likely that the “solution” will only make things worse.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at hli.org/2026/10/socialism-and-the-family-are-incompatible.