The Vatican and the Revolution: A Promise Kept
The Lepanto Institute’s findings, read alongside Fr Charles Murr’s warning, expose not an isolated controversy but a convergence long in the making
There are scandals that erupt in a moment, and there are scandals that mature over decades until familiarity disguises their danger. The controversy surrounding the Vatican’s World Meeting of Popular Movements belongs unmistakably to the latter category. Reviewing the Lepanto Institute’s recent report, Fr Charles Murr offered a judgment that should arrest attention: what is now being revealed is not shocking, but recognisable—“the fulfillment of a threat made years ago… a promise kept.”¹ That observation does more than interpret the present moment; it situates it within a trajectory, suggesting that what we are witnessing is not an anomaly, but an arrival.
If that is so, then the matter before the Church is not whether a single meeting was ill-judged, but whether a pattern has formed—quietly, incrementally, and with insufficient scrutiny—by which ecclesial structures have entered into proximity with movements whose underlying principles stand in tension with the Church’s doctrinal inheritance. The question is not whether the Church speaks to the poor; she must. The question is whether, in doing so, she has preserved the clarity that distinguishes Catholic social doctrine from the ideologies that so often claim to speak in the name of the poor.
The World Meeting of Popular Movements, inaugurated in 2014, was presented as a gathering of grassroots organisations representing those excluded from economic participation, united around the themes of land, housing, and work. These concerns are not alien to the Church. From Rerum Novarum onward, Catholic teaching has insisted that labour is not a commodity, that the family is prior to the State, and that property carries obligations as well as rights.² Yet the same tradition that defends the poor also rejects false remedies. Leo XIII warned that socialism would “rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.”³
Pius XI would later intensify this judgment in Quadragesimo Anno, declaring unequivocally that “religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms.”⁴ The reasoning is not political but anthropological: socialism rests upon a conception of man and society incompatible with the Christian understanding of the human person, the family, and the moral order. This doctrinal line reaches its clearest articulation in Divini Redemptoris, where the Church states:
“Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilisation may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever.”⁵
This is not a prudential judgment subject to revision; it is a moral boundary grounded in the nature of truth itself.
It is precisely against that boundary that the Lepanto Institute’s findings must be read. The report identifies movements such as the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), whose programme includes land occupation and forced redistribution, often accompanied by the destruction of productive property; the international network La Via Campesina, whose own statements frame agrarian struggle within explicitly anti-capitalist and class-conflict paradigms; and organisations such as the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC), whose historical associations include collaboration with revolutionary and guerrilla movements in Latin America.⁶ These are not merely charitable organisations advocating for the poor; they are movements formed within ideological frameworks rooted in Marxist analysis and praxis.⁷
The report further highlights the significance of Spin Time Labs in Rome, a centre associated with radical activism, from which participants processed to Vatican events, symbolically linking ecclesial space with an activist ecosystem.⁸ Nor is this trajectory new. Earlier meetings included the widely discussed 2015 encounter in which Evo Morales presented a hammer-and-sickle crucifix to Pope Francis, a symbol whose ideological resonance cannot be dismissed as accidental.⁹
Yet the controversy does not rest solely upon presence. It rests upon affirmation.
Addressing participants at the 2025 meeting, Pope Leo XIV declared:
“I am here, I am with you… The Church supports your just struggles… your initiatives can become new public policies and social rights.”¹⁰
He further described land, housing, and work as “sacred rights,” situating these demands within a moral vocabulary that resonates deeply with Catholic social teaching.¹¹ At the same time, he insisted:
“We are not serving an ideology but truly living the Gospel.”¹²
That distinction must be granted. The intention is pastoral. Yet intention does not dissolve tension. When the Church’s language converges with that of movements whose philosophical premises are grounded in materialist anthropology and class struggle, the risk is not that the Church consciously adopts an ideology, but that she becomes ambiguous in relation to it.
It is here that Fr Murr’s analysis becomes decisive. The danger, he suggests, is not that Marxist movements seek the destruction of the Church, but that they recognise her utility. “They would love to use the Church… they want the structure to remain… because that network is precious and it’s to be used.”¹³ The Church’s global network—parishes, dioceses, charitable institutions, and moral authority—constitutes a structure of influence unparalleled in history. To align that structure, even implicitly, with revolutionary movements is to risk transforming the Church from an agent of conversion into an instrument of mobilisation.
Such a development cannot be understood apart from the theological currents of the past century. Pope St Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, warned that modernism would dissolve doctrinal clarity into the categories of contemporary thought, calling it “the synthesis of all heresies.”¹⁴ Within this broader shift, Marxist categories entered Catholic discourse most visibly through the rise of Liberation Theology, which reframed theological analysis in terms of class struggle and structural oppression.¹⁵ As Fr Murr observes, this represented not merely a doctrinal deviation but a methodological substitution: “Let’s take away scholasticism and put in Marxism and use that as a philosophical base for Catholic theology.”¹⁶
The implications are profound. When theology is reframed in such terms, sin becomes structural, redemption becomes social transformation, and the mission of the Church is interpreted through political categories. Charity itself is altered. No longer primarily ordered to the salvation of souls, it risks becoming, in Murr’s words, “an industry,” a means of reshaping society according to immanent goals.¹⁷
The Church, of course, must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. But she does so not as an end in itself, but as an expression of divine charity ordered toward the ultimate good of man, which is union with God. When that order is inverted—when material transformation eclipses supernatural redemption—the Church risks becoming indistinguishable from the movements she seeks to guide.
At its deepest level, the conflict concerns the meaning of suffering itself. Marxism promises liberation through the eradication of suffering by restructuring society. Christianity proclaims redemption through the Cross. When St Peter sought to spare Our Lord His Passion, he was rebuked: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” The temptation was not cruelty but compassion detached from sacrifice—a vision of salvation without suffering.
Fr Murr expresses the point with clarity: “This is how we are saved—through the cross. Not by avoiding it… communism is a lie.”¹⁸
The Church may go out to meet revolutionaries; she betrays nothing in doing so. She has always entered the world not to affirm it, but to convert it. She may listen, but she must also teach; she may accompany, but she must also judge.
The Church does not lose herself by speaking to revolutionaries; she loses herself when she forgets she was sent to convert them.
For if the Church forgets the Cross, she will not redeem the world. She will merely reflect it.
- Fr Charles Murr, interview with Michael Hitchborn, Anchor Team 251: Rumblings in Rome (Lepanto Institute, May 2026), remarks on the World Meeting of Popular Movements.
- Rerum Novarum (15 May 1891), esp. nos. 3–15 on labour, property, and social order.
- Ibid., no. 4: “rob the lawful possessor… create utter confusion in the community.”
- Quadragesimo Anno (15 May 1931), no. 120: “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms.”
- Divini Redemptoris (19 March 1937), no. 58: “Communism is intrinsically wrong…”
- Lepanto Institute, Walking Together with Revolutionaries: Pope Leo’s 2025 Meeting with Marxist Popular Movements (2026), full report analysis of participating organisations.
- Ibid., sections documenting the ideological orientation and activities of participating movements, including MST and La Via Campesina.
- Ibid.; see also reporting on Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), including its land occupation campaigns and agrarian strategy rooted in redistributionist praxis.
- Ibid.; La Via Campesina, mission statements and international advocacy framing agrarian reform within anti-capitalist paradigms.
- Ibid.; Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC), historical associations with revolutionary and guerrilla-linked movements in Guatemala.
- Lepanto Institute article on the 2025 meeting (accessed 2026), including reference to Spin Time Labs and movement coordination.
- Ibid., on the role of Spin Time Labs as a hub for activist organisation prior to Vatican events.
- Ibid., contextual discussion of the 2015 meeting and the Morales hammer-and-sickle crucifix incident.
- Pope Leo XIV, Address to the World Meeting of Popular Movements (23 October 2025), Vatican official text.
- Ibid.: “I am here, I am with you… The Church supports your just struggles…”
- Ibid.: “your initiatives can become new public policies and social rights.”
- Ibid.: “we are not serving an ideology but truly living the Gospel.”
- Fr Charles Murr, Anchor Team 251: Rumblings in Rome, Lepanto Institute, YouTube broadcast (May 2026).
Watch interview - Fr Charles Murr, interview remarks on the strategic use of ecclesial structures by ideological movements.
- Pascendi Dominici Gregis (8 September 1907), on modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.”
- Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation” (Libertatis Nuntius, 1984).
- Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (Libertatis Conscientia, 1986).
- Fr Charles Murr, interview remarks on Marxism as a substitute philosophical framework for theology.
- Ibid., critique of charity as “industry” and transformation into social mechanism.
- Ibid., theological discussion of suffering, redemption, and Marxism’s rejection of the Cross.
Banner image description:
St Peter’s Square beneath a brooding sky, with shadowed demonstrators bearing red banners in the foreground and the Basilica illuminated in the distance—symbolising tension between sacred authority and ideological agitation.
Tags: Vatican, Pope Leo XIV, Communism, Catholic Social Teaching, Lepanto Institute, Liberation Theology, World Meeting of Popular Movements, Nuntiatoria
Social summary:
A “promise kept”? The Vatican’s engagement with revolutionary movements raises a deeper question: has the Church blurred the line between Catholic doctrine and ideology—and what happens if she forgets the Cross?
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