At the same time he criticized Marxism as an ideology, saying communist regimes have distorted and marred Karl Marx’s intellectual legacy. “It is no exaggeration to say that nothing has damaged the interests of Marx the philosopher more than Marxism,” he said.

Marx himself is not beyond criticism too, the professor said, since he wrongly reduced a human being to no more than a product of his physical circumstances. His prediction that capitalism would inevitably crumble under internal contradictions has also proved false so far.

Earlier, the Catholic Church kept a hostile attitude towards Karl Marx and his legacy. Pope Benedict XVI singled out Marxism as one of the great scourges of the modern age, accusing it of damaging both material and spirit.

Marx joins a number of historical figures whose role the Vatican has reassessed recently. Last year it erected a statue of Galileo in a move to apologize for persecuting him over his support of heliocentrism. Later, a senior Catholic Church official said Darwin’s Theory of Evolution did not contradict the faith. And in July, L’Osservatore praised Oscar Wilde, the gay playwright, as “a man who, behind a mask of amorality, asked himself what was just and what was mistaken.”