I think that Marxism and Catholicism are different in this way: that Marxism believes itself to be scientific, and that it can achieve specific results by using specific measures. It is a central tenet of Marxism that human nature is pliable and that a perfect society can be produced by economic manipulation and force.
Catholicism, conversely, believes that no human society can be perfect and that there will always be sin in the world. Moreover Catholicism believes, per the doctrine of Original Sin, than human nature is essentially inalterable by human means. Catholicism seeks a perfect society in the New Jerusalem after the Last Judgment.
And as far as checks and balances are concerned, Marxism necessarily has none. It is a total and totalizing ideology.
Catholicism has two checks: Scripture and Tradition. Scriptural interpretation in the Church has always been multifaceted - there has never been a literalist majority among exegetes. No Pope can change what his predecessors have taught - although there have been Popes who were absolutely repulsive in terms of their personal behavior, there has never been a "rogue Pope" on matters of doctrine or moral teaching. Alexander VI acknowledged that fornication was immoral even while he practiced it. It would never have occurred to him to declare fornication morally acceptable just because he enjoyed it.
Marxism, by its very nature, demands full control of the State. Even in the middle of the Middle Ages there was a very healthy debate raging between advocates of papal sovereignty and advocates of the distinction between ecclesiastical and secular government. Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy is probably the most famous, the most archetypal Catholic writer and poet in history. He lived at the turn of the 1300s. Yet he openly rebuked Popes he disagreed with and championed the political cause of the Emperor against the Pope even while he lived in the Papal Kingdom.
So within the Church of the Middle Ages there was a freedom of political thought unimaginable to those who lived in the "enlightened" First French Republic or the Bolshevik regime of Lenin - a freedom of political thought analogous to that of the pre-Civil War USA.
And the Church certainly encouraged scientific research. Albertus Magnus reintroduced the methods of scientific experiment to Europe in the XIIIth century by trying to replicate the biological research of Aristotle. He was much admired for his intellectual accomplishments and became the general of the Dominican Order, one of the three most powerful religious orders in the Church. He established schools throughout Germany and France.
One of these schools became the Sorbonne, where a French friar named Jean Buridan formulated a theory which would later become the First Law of Thermodynamics.
And few critics of the Church acknowledge that Copernicus was a Catholic priest who taught at a papally-approved University and that he lectured on his theories quite openly in Rome fifty years before Galileo was born.
This kind of freedom of research contrasts quite favorably with Lysenkoism.
wideawake, if you remember from our collaboration on the Broder article, Broder has a web forum.
Yesterday I posted that in my opinion, the way out of the current mess for Germany (and Europe) is a return to the roots of bourgeois (in the non-derogatory sense) society: Christianity (although I'm Jewish, I don't think Europe can become a Judeo-Christian society like the U.S.), family, and the enlightenment.
Two people responded, one largely agreeing with me, the other said, "Christianity and the enlightenment are mutually incompatible. And 'family' is on the wane anyway." No explanation, no reasoning, no sign of critical self-examination.
To be fair, I too had not gone to great lengths to argue my point, but at least I spent some time discussing the severe problems Germany is in. If you're interested, I've summarized the key points of an article by historian Arnulf Baring on this topic here.