The actual belief is that they did not really die, and were taken away by God to Heaven or the Garden of Eden to await their return, presumably at the Second Coming or something. It's not a reincarnation issue. What's the Pauline writing on the topic which you reference?


In Catholic theology, the teachings of Christ on the subject of wealth and the poor have nothing to do with temporal or material substance and everything to do with the spiritual. Wealth is not evil, but being so much of a material thing, should be regarded as a burden to spiritual fulfillment in Christ. What is pleasing to Christ is that we love one another as He loves us all, and who could truly love his brother man, and see him starve or suffer want, when he has the means to easily alleviate that suffering. Christ's admonition to give to the poor was not for the benefit of the poor but the rich, which is fundamentally the exact opposite of Marx and Engels and their ilk.

While you may be right about Ratzinger avoiding getting caught up in a controversy or being seen to endorse a view he opposes (as happened with the supposed advocacy of condom use parsed from an extremely out-of-context quote in a discussion about the AIDS issue) through the superficial similarities of Marxian class preferences and Christian charity, it may be that the answer is much simpler from a Catholic perspective - the Marxist parallels pass unnoticed for the simple reason that in our mindset they do not remotely exist or parallel.