So I overheard one person I know telling another person I know that “socialism and communism are evil and the church is very clear on that” (referring to the catholic church). And I’m trying to channel my burning frustration about it into asking what people know about communism and how it has interacted with religion more generally, but also catholicism especially, now or historically. I super hard doubt what this person said was even remotely correct, but I could believe that the catholic church takes a wishy washy fence-sitting stance because it tends to on a number of things.
At any rate, it’s something I should know better because I do have catholic people in my life and so sometimes there may be a need to talk to them about these things through the framing of religion to get past the “communism is purely atheistic” type thinking.
Answers from your own knowledge or resources that go into it are both welcomed. I don’t really know how to approach looking for it on my own in this instance because a lot of western religious material is probably influenced by colonizer thinking, or in the US, influenced by red scare nonsense.
Communism is not necessarily totally incompatible with religion on a superficial level (though the different philosophical frameworks, materialism vs idealism, obviously will clash at some point), and in particular there are social elements in many religions, including in Christianity and Islam, that communists would approve of.
That being said the Catholic church is a deeply reactionary institution. They cooperated with the Nazis and were instrumental in destroying socialism in some eastern European countries, most notably Poland. The same goes for the Orthodox church to a lesser extent.
While personal religious beliefs can be progressive, institutionalized religion is almost always inherently reactionary. Exceptions such as liberation theology in Latin America exist but are rare (another positive example is the tradition of resistance struggle within Shia Islam).