Ideological conflict

1. Ideological conflict is one of the stresses in modern society that permeates all human activities. It reaches into the classroom and the home, and makes antagonists among schoolmates, between them and the school system, and it divides families. Thus from an early age, children become accustomed to the warfare of ideas, and as adults they carry on their own ideological battles, bringing these to national and international levels. They are not only conditioned towards engaging in ideological conflicts and rivalries, but also to a conduct that is more emotional than logical and which casts their opponents into satanic roles or roles of enemies of humanity. This leads to witchhunts, pogroms, purges, prejudices and hostilities that erupt into violence.

2. Countries which have recently achieved independence, and which are trying to establish a cultural and political identity of their own, and need effective and impartial aid from all the richer and more developed countries, find themselves involved in, and sometimes overwhelmed by, ideological conflicts, which inevitably create internal divisions, to the extent in some cases of provoking full civil war. This is also because investments and aid for development are often diverted from their proper purpose and used to sustain conflicts, apart from and in opposition to the interests of the countries which ought to benefit from them. (Papal Encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 30 December 1987).

3. Although the world of today has a very vivid awareness of its unity and of how one man depends on another in needful solidarity, it is most grievously torn into opposing camps by conflicting forces. For political, social, economic, racial and ideological disputes still continue bitterly, and with them the peril of a war which would reduce everything to ashes. True, there is a growing exchange of ideas, but the very words by which key concepts are expressed take on quite different meanings in diverse ideological systems. (Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes, 1965).