Trotsky, Lenin, and Kamenev (from left to right), May 5, 1920, Moscow, Sverdlov Place
On reading these lines about Ostpolitik, someone could ask if the enormous changes that took place in Russia resulted from an ingenious move by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Perhaps the Vatican, on the basis of the best information, foresaw that communism, corroded by internal crises, would begin in its turn to self-destruct. And to encourage the world headquarters of materialistic atheism to this autodemolition, the Catholic Church, situated on the other extreme of the ideological spectrum, feigned her own destruction. Perhaps this is what led communism to markedly diminish its persecution of the Church. After all, if both were moribund, and arrangement would be understandable. In other words, it is to the flexibility of the Church that we should attribute the conditions for the flexibility of the communist world.
It would be fitting to reply that if the members of the Sacred Hierarchy knew that indigence and ruin would force communism to self-destruct, they should have denounced the misery and convoked all the peoples of the West to prepare the way for rehabilitating Russia and the world as soon as communism effectively collapsed.
They should not have remained silent, letting the phenomenon evolve without benefiting from Catholic influence and the generous and solicitous cooperation of Western governments, since only this denunciation could have prevented the Soviet collapse from reaching its present dead end, wherein everything is misery and imbroglio.
1936 children’s Communist Army.
In any case, it is false to say that the self-destruction of the Church has hastened the self-destruction of communism – unless there were a secret treaty between the two in this regard.
But such a treaty — or suicidal pact — would lack any legitimacy and usefulness for the Catholic world, not to mention everything in this mere hypothesis of offense to the popes in whose pontificates this double euthanasia was supposedly arranged.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Part III, Chapter II, pg. 149–150.
