Catholicism and Communism: A Possible Alliance in the Thirties under the Gaze of Murilo Mendes and Jacques Maritain

Abstract

This article investigates the formulation in the thirties of an imaginary that proposed both that the origin of Marxism was strictly Christian and the possibility that Catholicism “reabsorbed” the “Achievements” of the left in history. From this operation that expropriated the communists from “communism” a kind of communist Catholicism, or Catholic communism, was projected. We will focus on the political columns of Murilo Mendes, an exponent of the Brazilian avant-garde and the trip to Buenos Aires made in 1936 by the French philosopher Jacques Maritain thanks to the management of Victoria Ocampo, director of Sur magazine. Maritain’s postulates and the debates in which he is involved dialogue with Murilo’s satirical prose, and between both interventions the limits and scope of a left-wing Catholicism that lays the foundations for the primacy of the human are outlined.