Marxism is undeniably the most powerful challenge to religion of our time, if not of all time. When we have estimated the enormous military might which Marxist governments and parties now have at their disposal, the vast material resources, the huge proportions of the earth’s surface, the teeming millions of human beings at their command, we have only begun to estimate its power. Indeed, if we think of these alone we have not so much as begun to assess its inner strength, and we are already on the way to be the victims of its own materialistic ideology. We have to understand the fascination which has enabled it to gather to itself even this material might. When all has been said of the brutality of its leaders, of secret police and labour camps, of denunciations and purges and liquidations, the fact must be faced that Marxist Communism inspires in millions a conviction, a faith and a hope, an enthusiasm and self-abnegation, a sense of release and of solidarity—which even the Pope, in his Christmas Allocution, contrasted with the bewildered disillusion of youth in the ‘free world’. Perhaps even more impressive than the devotion it can arouse in its party-line conformists, is the agony of genuine remorse it can produce (as Koesder and others have told us) in the renegades, the purged and the liquidated themselves.

Whence this power and fascination; Perhaps its greatest danger lies in the fact that it is so litde felt and understood by most of those who oppose it. Marxism is labelled materialistic; and we tend to dismiss it as some drab positivist theory which can see no further than solids, liquids and gases. This is not the time to expound, let alone to criticise, the intricacies of Dialectical Materialism.