re: #291 Gus

Yep. It’s because the church was in competition for power.

It’s somewhat more complicated than that; it’s more that they saw religion as a symptom, that people would— hah— tend to cling to it when the real world couldn’t make them happy or meet their needs.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

In practicality, in the actual rule by regimes, some communist regimes saw religion as a competing power and attacked it, sporadically in the USSR, systematically in China and Cuba— but other places co-opted it, like Vietnam. Some of the communist parties in South and Central America are anti-clerical, seeing the Catholic church as an agent of repression, while others are ‘social justice’ Catholics, seeing the communism that’s at the heart of Christian theology as supportive of communism.