Eastern Catholicism and Communism

[Ed_Rand]

I’ve never posted in this forum and I don’t know much about Eastern Catholicism, so I hope I don’t offend.

I’m researching a topic that deals a lot with the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and it’s application in the US. It got me to wondering…

Did the Eastern Church speak out on questions of economic justice when Socialism/Communism was on the rise in the late 19the century? For instance, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum helped guide Western Catholics through the extremes of Communism and Laissez-Faire Capitalism and helped to determine the proper relations between labor and capital.

Did the Eastern Church make similar efforts? Thanks for any info.

 

[ziapueblo]

Not sure, but this book by Father Christopher Zugger, The Forgotten: Catholics in the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin, might answer some questions.

God bless,
ZP

 

[Madaglan]

I’ve never posted in this forum and I don’t know much about Eastern Catholicism, so I hope I don’t offend.

I’m researching a topic that deals a lot with the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and it’s application in the US. It got me to wondering…

Did the Eastern Church speak out on questions of economic justice when Socialism/Communism was on the rise in the late 19the century? For instance, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum helped guide Western Catholics through the extremes of Communism and Laissez-Faire Capitalism and helped to determine the proper relations between labor and capital.

Did the Eastern Church make similar efforts? Thanks for any info.

Here are some of my working thoughts.

I’m not sure the Eastern Churches would have framed their words according to the language of Western economists. The theories of Socialism and Communism in particular take into account an industrialized society that already has passed through revolutionary political changes–which, in theory at least, challenge monarchical forms of government.

The Eastern Churches in the 19th century were for the most part not found within industrialized/-ing countries, such as England, but in rural areas of the Russian Empire, on the borders of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, or in the confines of the Ottoman Empire. While the thought certainly permeated to them, it was thought (as in the case of Russia) that the theories of Socialism/Communism were long from becoming a reality, due to the lack of industrialization.

Their historical understanding of injustice was not the same as that in England, France, the German states, etc.