Siren song

There's a parallel between Marxism and Catholicism. Some people are smitten by the idea of Marxism. They fall in love with Marxism. French intellectuals and Jewish-American intellectuals used to wave away the atrocities of Stalinism. It's a love-is-blind attitude. They have unshakable faith in the utopian vision of Marxism. That's impervious to all the gulags, purges, torture, genocide. The sheer idea is paramount. Like a Platonic archetype that can't be tarnished by contact with the grubby fleshy world.

Loyal Catholics exhibit the same fanatical attachment to stainless Catholic ideas that Marxists exhibit. The bewitching ideal hovers above time and space in gnostic purity. No matter how often the Siren lures sailors to their destruction, there's always another sailor who drowns in the Tiber.