Or, if you want to be all historically accurate, I guess you could say it’s that talking to communists is like talking to Catholics.  Still, the similarities are striking.  Really, this is true for anyone with a certain ideological purity, and the same could be said for libertarians, or intense pacifists, or anyone with serious assumptions (obviously this is true of all of us –we are all supported by assumptions, but since some people’s assumptions are in the minority, theirs becomes more obvious). So, look at this:

1. There is no such thing as orthodoxy.  A Catholic friend (who is orthodox) told me this.  There is either Catholic or non-Catholic.  This is the case for dogmatic communists as well: of course, they would not admit they were dogmatic, or even orthodox.  They’re simply right.  Hence, ideology.

2. Wrongness is not possible.  If there’s something inconsistent, it is never the Party or the Church or the Market (depending on if you’re commie or Catholic or libertarian).  These simply cannot fail.  It would be impossible.  And so there’s a cool maxim in this: “Intellectual honesty seeks the truth; ideology seeks to prove itself true.”

3. Growth is not possible.  If you’re already perfect, you have no need to grow.  Instead, if a change is needed, it is never acknowledged but rather denied for as long as possible until it is accepted as though it always existed.  The differences between Vatican I and Vatican II, for example, really do resemble some of the stark changes in 1984 in which “eternal wars” change all the time.

All of this is not to deny that I love the Church, or that I do believe certain fundamentals within it really do never change.  Nor do I deny that the Holy Spirit works to guide that Church.  It’s just that I think we all ought to act like grown ups about acknowledging an argument and the possibility of change.