- Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Sen. Bernard Sanders, independent socialist from Vermont, just couldn’t resist. On May 1, he sent out an email wishing us all a “very happy May Day” and extolling the virtues of collectivism.

For those who might have trouble placing May Day, it is an international celebration of communism. In the former Soviet Union, May Day was marked by giant parades in Red Square, always featuring the latest and largest military hardware communist Russia had to offer.

Typically, the speeches glossed over the 100 million people killed by communists, the gulags, the reeducation camps, etc. Nowadays, the communists in China skip over the murders, forced sterilizations, concentration camps, the destruction of Hong Kong, and slave labor upon which their regime is built.

None of that slowed the millionaire collectivist from Vermont. He knows that Western governments usually play along and look away from the depredations.

Let me give you a specific example. On the very same day (at the tail end of 2020) that communist China arrested two nuns in Hong Kong because they were, you know, too Catholic, it was also reported that Chinese and European Union officials had agreed to an economic investment deal between the European Union and China.

“This agreement will uphold our interests and promotes our core values,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. She was not clear as to which “core values” the agreement promotes. The legitimacy of slave labor? Religious repression? Seizure of others’ territory? Perhaps those are merely the “interests” that Mrs. von der Leyen mentioned that the EU and China share in common.

Contrarywise, and to its credit, the Catholic Church has been a durable and dangerous opponent of communism.

Last Sunday, when Mr. Sanders was sotto voce sanctioning state-sponsored atrocities, more than a billion Roman Catholics celebrated the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. This feast, constructed in 1955 by Pope Pius XII, is directed specifically at the errors and rapacity of communism and emphasizes that any work done well and done to meet one’s obligations to the kingdom of God and his creations can be holy.

The feast is a reminder that envy — the foundation of collectivism — is among the most corrosive and deadly of sins. Unlike the communism and collectivism that Mr. Sanders celebrates, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker focuses on the individual and the family.

Part of the reason why the Roman Catholic Church has endured for two millennia while its tormentors have been consigned to untended and unloved graves is that the church understands the primacy of the individual and the individual conscience. Only deeply committed collectivists — like Mr. Sanders — talk about things such as “solidarity” and “unity” as if such things are possible outside of belief in the dignity and autonomy of each person.

Salvation is not a collectivist enterprise, and it is not available through purely human agency. Only fools seek it in governments like the feckless EU.

Ask Jimmy Lai. Mr. Lai, Hong Kong’s most prominent Catholic and most prominent media owner, was arrested a few years back. He still languishes in a Chinese prison. But like millions before him, he lives safely in the knowledge that God loves him and that nothing his jailers do will change that.

The same should be true for all of us. Mr. Lai knows that the values of this world and those of the next do not align. That’s something the communists and their front men will never understand, and it is why their ideology — Unity! Solidarity! Bayonet the holdouts! — like all other passing ideologies, will eventually return to dust.

• Michael McKenna is a columnist for The Washington Times and co-host of “The Unregulated” podcast. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House. 

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