Pope Francis used a lecture to foreign diplomats on 10 January to launch a riposte against cancel culture.
Catholics who have been resisting the forces of secularisation and progressive values across the world will be grateful to him for turning the eyes of the Church towards a movement that poses the greatest threat to the Church for a generation.
The relationship of the Church with the forces of the political and cultural Left has been a fraught one. A hundred years ago, the social revolutionaries of Marxism 1.0 fixed the Church in its crosshairs and launched a brutal assault, imprisoning and executing Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Protestants without discrimination in their attempt to crush the old order and initiate a new history. The state was to replace God and family. Heaven was abolished and the perfectly just social order replaced it. Those who refused to cooperate in this ideological revolution were identified as mad or bad, and “cancelled” permanently. The death toll in the Soviet Union is in the ball park of 40 million, and in China millions more.
