2. The arguments against the coexistence of the Church with a completely collectivized State are not valid for a State which is incompletely collectivized.

According to certain reports of the press, some Communist governments have expressed the resolu­tion ("pari passu" with the concession of a certain religious liberty) to carry out a partial retreat in So­cialism by admitting in fact if not in law, and provi­sionally, some forms of prrivate property. It will be said that in this case the regime will have a less noxious influence over souls. Could the Church not agree then that Catholic preaching and teaching would pass over in silence, not precisely the principle of private property, but the whole extension of this principle in Catholic morality?

To this it can be answered that it is not always the most brutally anti-natural regimes ‑ or the most flagrant or declared errors ‑ which succeed in de­forming souls the most profoundly. Declared error and brutal injustice, for example, cause revolt and horror, while partial injustices and partial errors are more easily accepted as normal so that both the one and the other corrupt mentalities more rapidly. it was much easier to combat Arianism than semi­-Arianism, Pelagianism than semi‑Pelagianism, Protest­ism than Jansenism, the brutal Revolution than Liberalism, Communism than a mitigated Socialism. Besides this, the Church's mission does not consist only in combating brutally radical and flagrant error, but in eliminating from the minds of the faithful each and every error, however tenuous it may be, to