Theologian bishop says AOC pushed culture aside in heated response to Marco Rubio speech

The head of a Roman Catholic Diocese in Minnesota says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., pushed "culture off to the side" in her response to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last month.  

Rubio spoke about Western civilization and the shared culture of Europe and America in a well-received address to the conference.

"We are part of one civilization – Western civilization," Rubio said. "We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir."

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Rubio used his speech to call to mind cultural achievements associated with Western civilization and expressed the desire for allies to be proud of their culture and heritage.  He also used the speech to call out illegal immigration and certain climate agendas. 

AOC offered a heated response to Rubio’s address when asked about it at the Munich conference. She called his remarks an appeal to "Western culture," saying the foundation is "thin," as culture is "fluid." 

"Culture is changing," she said, according to a video of her response. "Culture always changes. Culture, for the entire history of human civilization, has been a fluid, evolving thing that is a response to the conditions that we live in, and so, they want to take this mantle of culture, at the end of the day though, is very thin. So, the response that we have to have again, is again, it's material, it’s class-based, it’s common interest." 

Theologian Bishop Robert Barron, who leads the Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, told "The Will Cain Show" last week that the congresswoman’s response was right out of Karl Marx’s playbook.  

"When AOC was commenting on that... she kind of pushed culture off to the side," Barron said. " ‘Well, Western civilization, Western culture, is a very thin idea. Shouldn't we be focused on,’ as she put it, ‘the material,’ you know, substructure and the class situation?' Well, that's right out of the Karl Marx playbook."

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The bishop explained that Marx viewed culture as simply "a superstructure that protects the economic substructure" and viewed religion as a "problem." 

"That's what I found chilling, is to move away from a cultural orientation, a religious orientation, to a much more explicitly Marxist one," Barron said. "Because, you know, look at the 20th century, there's plenty of evidence of what happens when Marxist societies come into being." 

Barron recalled how religious leaders played a critical role in great social reform movements of the 20th century and the Civil Rights Movement, but he said this pattern has taken a turn. 

"So much of the social reform movements going on today are antipathetic to religion," the bishop reflected. "They would see religion as the problem. They're not led by religious people. Religion is looked upon with suspicion. That, I suspect, too, comes from a lot of, at least implicitly, Marxist formation people are getting in the universities, sad to say." 

While Barron recognizes "every civilization is marked by sin," he believes it is important not to set aside all of Western civilization because of its flaws.  

"We should do, I think, what Rubio suggested," Barron explained. "(That) is to celebrate these great principles and intuitions from... Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King. You can trace a... golden thread that defines Western civilization. We should celebrate that, not denigrate it, or characterize it as thin in contradistinction to the economic substructure."

Fox News Digital reached out to Ocasio-Cortez's office, and her representative said there were no additional comments about the Munich Security Conference.

Fox News' Eric Mack contributed to this report.