The following is an excerpt from Steven Mosher’s new book, The Devil and Communist China (TAN Books, 2024, 383 pages). Part history, part biography, part religious exploration, Mosher’s latest book studies the communist ideology and its most devoted practitioner today — the People’s Republic of China and its leader Xi Jinping.

 

“It is hard to imagine two men who had less in common than Chairman Mao Zedong and Archbishop Fulton Sheen. The distance between the thoughts, words, and deeds of these two towering twentieth-century figures, one the leading Chinese Communist and the other the saintly archbishop, spans the distance between heaven and hell. Yet they strongly agreed on one thing. Communism, they both insisted, was inspired not by love but by hate, and that it was precisely that hate that gave it its terrible power to destroy.

Mao, for his part, exulted in the destructive power that this hate unleashed. “Communism is not love,” he once gloated. Driving the point home, he added, “Communism is a hammer we use to crush the enemy.” Coming from someone who wielded the hammer of Com­munism so effectively that he became the greatest mass murderer in human history, Mao’s description of Communism as hate weaponized should give us all pause. 

While Mao was celebrating the deadly utility of Communism, Archbishop Fulton Sheen was at pains to distinguish this ideology of hate from its opposite, Christianity, which is centered upon love. In his first book, entitled The Cross and the Beatitudes, he wrote, “In contrast to [the] Christian philosophy of forgiveness, there exists for the first time in the history of the world a philosophy and a political and social system based not on love, but on hate, and that is Communism.” 

Sheen continued, “Communism believes that the only way it can establish itself is by inciting revolution, class-struggle, and violence. Hence its regime is characterized by a hatred of those who believe the family is the basic unit of society. The very Communistic gesture of the clenched fist is a token of its pugnacious and destructive spirit, and a striking contrast indeed to the nailed hand of the Savior pleading for­giveness for the clenched-fist generation who sent Him to the Cross.”

Mao Zedong, in the name of this hateful ideology, sent tens of mil­lions of people to their deaths. None of his deadly actions ever seem to have occasioned an ounce of contrition or a moment of remorse on his part. In fact, in a way that can only be described as diabolical, Mao seems to have celebrated death as a necessary weeding of the human garden. “What does it matter if a third of the population dies,” he said. “Their bodies will fertilize the soil.” That was what he thought of those he ground into oblivion: they were only useful as human compost.

“Hatred of God comes from pride,” and few in the economy of evil have been as prideful, self-centered, and narcissistic as the man born in what the Chinese zodiac calls the Year of the Snake. A godless creature like Mao is a prefig­uring of the antichrist, if not himself a lesser example of what awaits us at the end of time. He may not have made a conscious pact with the devil, as Karl Marx seems to have come close to doing, but he certainly embraced every evil known to God and man. He longed to be the prince of this world—a dangerous ambition, indeed, since those who are driven by it generally wind up serving, whether they are aware of it or not, the real prince of this world, Satan himself. 

We are in no position to impose a final judgment on Mao, or on any other human being, however much evil they may have wrought in their lives. Such dispositions are the sole province of God, who is the final arbiter of the souls He created. The only person that we can be certain is in hell is Judas Iscariot, about whom Our Lord said, “It would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (Mt 26:24). No one else is beyond the reach of redemption, although in the case of Mao—arguably the greatest mass murderer in human history--it certainly would have been a very long reach.

As his life grew to a close in the mid-seventies, Mao often remarked to visitors that he would soon be going to be with Marx. It seems clear from his lifelong descent into the depths of human wickedness that, given a choice—and we always have a choice—he would choose to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven. But hell, of course, already has a hellish master. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that behind Mao the Snake lurked the great dragon himself, waiting to devour him.

 

Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of The Devil and Communist China: From Mao Down to Xi.