O Washington
Jones, Arthur
O WASHINGTON Arthur Jones Cries and Whispers OWashington, what's new? I've been long gone. The last fifteen months of a lengthy absence were spent mainly in another foreign capital: London. My...
...After Pope Paul VI in 1968 condemned the use of artificial contraception, hundreds of thousands of U.S...
...Today some fifty bishops do— almost 20 per cent of the U.S...
...Well, the current version of Pax Americana: heavy on the Americana and light on the Pax...
...They talk of a "conversion" experience...
...Upstairs at Foggy Bottom are the splendid rooms where domestic and foreign dignitaries are wined, dined, influenced, or suborned...
...Matthiesen lives four miles from the Pantex plant that assembles nuclear warheads...
...And often they still are...
...The District of Columbia jail at 1902 D Street SE is mellow modern motel mauve...
...Foggy Bottom, by contrast, is all aluminum "Diplomats Entrance" and linoleum-tiled corridors, drab Twentieth Century governmental rectangular box architecture...
...Vocal bishops do provide high visibility on the issues: But it was women religious and a lay person who died in El Salvador, and it was John Shiel behind the prison glass when Bishop Sullivan came to call, not the other way round...
...Pax Britannica, Britain as world peacekeeper, was just beginning...
...Catholics, thousands of priests and nuns among them, gave up and left the institutional church...
...By contrast to Charles James Fox, no one could have been more "Little America" and isolationist than the first U.S...
...Damned if I know...
...It is my judgment that any use of nuclear weapons against an enemy is to be condemned...
...Somewhere: the unknown American who will be in office for the U.S...
...Shiel's visitor, Bishop Sullivan of Richmond, Virginia, lives in a state that has a net gain from military bases and military personnel of $5.5 billion after taxes...
...Upstairs at King Charles Street are narrow corridors reached by tiny elevators, empty bookcases and gaping cabinets robbed of their contents—information that mattered once, an empire ago...
...In the twenty years since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic church in the United States has perceptibly shifted on its moral axis...
...Bishop Sullivan was in town to see John Shiel, prisoner No...
...Not a fellow bishop, but a fellow member of Pax Christi U.S.A., the national branch of the international Catholic peace fellowship...
...And for more than ten years many U.S...
...At the beginning of 19821 attended instead my first U.S...
...The next-largest denomination is the Southern Baptists with eight million...
...There are few shadows to attract ghosts...
...We like to see ourselves as thoroughly consistent in both instances...
...In Amarillo, Texas, Bishop Leroy Mat-thiesen urged Catholics to quit working in the nuclear arms industry—as a matter of conscience...
...bishops have been watching their people be terrorized, deported, or murdered...
...Their main body, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, is working on a pastoral declaration for their November 1982 meeting...
...Secretary of State...
...Even a century later, when Queen Victoria and her grandson-in-law Tsar Nicholas II stopped for tea, they could look at the globe and know that between them they ruled considerably more than half of it...
...Suddenly, the risk of witnessing to the Gospel, a Latin American phenomenon, has taken hold of many U.S...
...Possibly not...
...Right-wing Catholics, bishops among them, have deplored the bishops' collective opposition to U.S...
...What is significant now is that it is bishops who are speaking out...
...Take that news picture we all know so well...
...Catholicism that reach far beyond even these nuclear issues...
...Capital folkways are interchangeable...
...The other element in the defense of individual life, the bishops in increasing numbers are arguing, is the quality of life and individual dignity being denied the poor...
...State Department briefing in years...
...Probably just what journalists whisper to each other: "Now what the hell was that supposed to mean...
...But the momentum that has gathered around the nuclear threat and El Salvadoran oppression already is picking up the corollary issue: military spending that deprives the national and global poor...
...For decades Catholic bishops were rightly regarded in the same light as New York's late Cardinal Francis Spellman, supreme military vicar, who declared, "My country right or wrong, I love it...
...involvement in El Salvador...
...Before 1782 (Lord Carrington is owed a bicentennial party) when Charles James Fox was named the first British Foreign Secretary, there were two departments: the North department for the top half of the world, and the South department for the bottom...
...bishops met in November for their annual Washington conference, Bishop Mark Hurley of Santa Rosa, California, said, "On right-to-life you [the media] called us right wing, and I am sure on this [nuclear arms opposition] you will call us left wing...
...The Latin American church is one manifestation of change, the anti-nuclear U.S...
...Does the world really care what passes between the British Foreign Secretary and the U.S...
...The differences are of style, rarely of intent, never of content...
...But there are more pressures than Vatican II weighing on the U.S...
...Britain's office of Foreign Secretary is but seven years older than that of the U.S...
...But on the peace issue they can show a leadership not previously experienced in U.S...
...By contrast, when Pope John Paul II reiterated the contraception ban last December, it generally was ignored...
...Five years ago, only three bishops belonged to the lay-organized and lay-run Pax Christi...
...Secretary of State...
...Yet Sullivan goes into the military parishes, not least around the Norfolk naval complex, urging the churches to become peace centers...
...Two decades ago no one believed that the Latin American Catholic church, child-bride of the military-political-moneyed-landed-Establishment, would one day stand firm against those powers as protector of the poor...
...What about organized opposition to the bishops within the church...
...Bishops have become nuclear-newsworthy at a time when protests such as Shiel's, and subsequent trials of the protesters, no longer matter to the media...
...No issue has galvanized the Catholic networks, from justice and peace centers to parishes, from monasteries and convents to episcopal headquarters, like El Salvador...
...It is immoral to possess nuclear weapons...
...Today's bishops argue they love their country, too...
...They have met with their beleaguered Latin American brother bishops, and they have recoiled from the death of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, slain while saying mass...
...What do the bishops-as-peacemakers mean to domestic politics...
...To oversimplify several extremely complex and historic trends, we turn south for an example...
...In room 2118, Department spokesman Dean Fischer does lip-synch for briefings the world over, just as Hodding Carter did in the Administration before this...
...That change in South and Central America stems in great measures from the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), when for four years the world's Catholic bishops discussed what sort of Christian witness the Roman Catholic church demanded of itself...
...bishops...
...The briefing room itself, all royal blue with a cut-out map of the world, looks Pax Britannica but actually is Pax Americana...
...He was visiting a colleague...
...Will they organize their flocks and fund their antinuclear concerns with the same zeal they have for right-to-life...
...But how much nuance is one going to get in a room packed with diplomatic correspondents and foreign affairs writers all equally hungry for a lead paragraph or the opening televised insight...
...bishops who are now speaking out...
...Anyway, what do Foreign Secretaries whisper to Secretaries of State at NATO meetings...
...What strikes me on D Street NW is, O Washington, you have remained the same...
...population...
...Foreign Office press briefing...
...Now the scapular, with full frontal facial photo, admits one to a different holy of holies, the briefing room, 2118...
...In the 1960s, lay Catholics tried to implement changes and were rebuffed—usually by bishops...
...And as Roman Catholic Bishop Walter Sullivan went through the security check the Wednesday after Christmas, he was on more than an ordinary pastoral visit...
...But in a different fashion: In Seattle, Archbishop Raymond Hun-thausen urged the members of his flock to consider withholding that portion of their Federal income tax destined for military spending...
...But there are sweeping changes in U.S...
...My return here reminds me that political folks in national capitals usually have more in common with each other than they do with the people who either put them there or pay for their keep...
...19764, a sixty-two-year-old bantamweight gap-toothed Irish-Polish Bostonian in the Catholic Worker tradition...
...They haven't yet...
...Four North American women, three of them nuns, were murdered last year in El Salvador...
...With many needy people in our country and the world, it seems we are turning our plows and pruning hooks into weapons of war," said San Bernardino's Straling in a letter to his diocese...
...The threat to use atomic weapons is immoral...
...If, on Pennsylvania Avenue, Christian politics means Moral Majority, on D Street SE Sullivan represents some radical shifts in America's mainline religion, the fifty-million-member Roman Catholic church, some 21 per cent of the U.S...
...For twenty years, North American dioceses have been sending nuns, priests, brothers, and laypeople as missioners to the South...
...Miles of video tape capture candor devoid of content...
...New York's Cardinal Cooke invoked the ghost of his predecessor, Spellman, by accepting a "just war" theory that allows possession of the Bomb as a deterrent leading to peace...
...To find out what the government doesn't want to talk about...
...interference in El Salvador, have scored Reagan's cutbacks in social spending, have deplored the escalation of the military budget...
...Yet, within the same city, what strikes me on D Street SE is, O America, you are changing...
...But someone does...
...When U.S...
...Bishops can't forbid members of their flock to make bombs, any more than they can tell them to set aside the cap, condom, or pill...
...New York's Cardinal Terrence Cooke does not think it immoral, and has said so...
...At King Charles Street in London and at 21st and D Streets NW in Washington, there will be press briefings...
...Why attend briefings...
...The Foreign Office is much more reserved, with its photo-less laminated yellow-and-white trifle that gives little clue as to whom it would admit to what...
...There, if the briefing was on time, Big Ben would just be striking six...
...And what do Secretaries of State mutter in reply...
...Since the start of the Reagan Administration, the U.S...
...Secretary of State's bicentennial in 1989...
...Shiel is one of the White House Five who last year threw their blood on the pillars of the executive mansion to protest nuclear arms and Alexander Haig's bird-of-prey attitude toward El Salvador...
...bishops another...
...Anniversaries ought to mean a little free government grub and grog for the respective diplomatic press corps, these Fleet Street grovelers and Foggy Bottom hacks...
...It could have been at the January 11 NATO meeting: Lord Peter Carrington leans over to whisper in the ear of Alexander Haig...
...Catholicism...
...But I do know when I hit D Street NW after the noon Foggy Bottom briefing, it's not like coming out into the Whitehall gloom...
...In 1980 and 1981 I repeatedly toddled from the Westminster tube station almost beneath Big Ben to clatter across the courtyard that leads to the 5 p.m...
...Catholic Workers and Pax Christi activists are nonviolent and birds of prayer...
...Sullivan is one of that growing and vocal band of Catholic bishops who protest the production and possession of nuclear arms...
...It is inevitable— and already under way...
...The political weight of all this shifting is the great unknown but, to one who has just come back into America from the outside, it has the greatest potential for social change of all the current unknowns...
...Secretary of State, that reluctant office holder, Thomas Jefferson...
...It may mean a different kind of Christian majority, with a much different sense of what is moral...
...bishops have jointly condemned U.S...
...State Department press credentials are worn around the neck on a chain, reminiscent of the scapular, once a badge of admission to an ecclesiastical order...
...Said Cleveland's Pilla: "We must counter militaristic logic with a whole new set of moral questions...
...From San Francisco and Archbishop John R. Quinn, to Cleveland and Bishop Anthony M. Pilla, from New Ulm, Minnesota, and Bishop Raymond Lucker, to San Bernardino, California, and Bishop Philip F. Straling, the message is the same: In Lucker's words, "I have thought and prayed about these issues for a long time...
...If found on the street, please hand in at the nearest police station...
...The Foreign Office is all marble-floored corridors, antique arches, and dusty busts of Foreign Secretaries past...
...Catholic hierarchy—and the number is increasing...
...In London, Nick Fenn or Roger Westbrook, clipped commentary and reserved charm, deal empty cards across their government-issue desks in the poker-faced noninformation game global governments Play-Perhaps, in a briefing, a journalist with a tidbit from a foreign ambassador or a clipping from the current Pravda can catch a flack off guard and capture a nuance for the lead paragraph...
...None of Alexander Hamilton's penchant for foreign entanglements for him...
...If it is adopted, they might try for a reprise of their El Salvador national network—which in turn conceivably would be in place for the 1984 Presidential election...
Vol. 46 • March 1982 • No. 3
