THE POPE & THE AMERICAN MIND
Schroth, Raymond A.
1filll THEPOPE&THEAMERICANMIND RAYMONDA. SCHROTH A view from the other shore It is one of the sad, and peculiar, images of modem history that, in the popular understanding of...
...Artie's dream is that the Pope's visit to the U.N...
...Paul looks at his face in the mirror and sighs over "God's little joke"mhis startling resemblance to Adolf Eichmann...
...and Jack Egan's idea that the Pope should hit the road, literally become 1 September 1978:556 a pilgrim moving from country to country every few months---fike Jesus and Paul, a leader with no place to lay his head---seems equally charming and "impractical...
...One character, Bunny Flingus, up at 4:45 A.M...
...The secretary operates the hi-fi for the Holy Father...
...but, except in general terms, they have never been communicated with the same force as the church's sexual discipline to the Church at large...
...To be a member of the Church in those years meant being part of something on the move, something perceived by insider and outsider alike as having value, as having ~he capacity to make a difference to the quality of life and the direction of world events...
...This evening, Mozart...
...When Archbishop Montini was finally elected Pope Paul VI, June 21, 1963---after remaining largely silent during the Council's first session--it is significant that his last effort before leaving Milan was in publicly defending the reputation of Pius XII, the man who in many ways he would come to resemble, against the charges in Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy, that the cold and political Pacelli had failed in his moral obligation to protest the Holocaust...
...To his credit, on social, political, economic and international issues the Pope's thinking and teaching have been consistently more progressive than those of most American Catholics...
...If this were not so, the" image of John XXIII--~a man who, I have been told by a Council peritus who met them both, was actually less warm and personally concerned in individual encounters than Paul VI--could never have electrified the world the way he did...
...Or did he...
...That evening as Paul and a few close aides watch the TV news they are confronted with a feminist who ridicules the celibate Pope's arguments against ordaining women...
...They tend to exaggerate the significance of the immediate and the ephemeral...
...A dead man presiding over a dead institution...
...He pu}ls himself meticulously, dutifully through the day...
...the freedom of women who feel called to ordination to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders...
...For .that reason .there was always something peculiarly attractive and refreshing about the understated, almost diffident rhetoric of Eugene ,McCarthy...
...Yet, Jesus, one might answer, did not ask Peter to be a diplomat...
...the freedom of diocesan priests (not religious orders who freely define themselves through the life of the vows) to receive all the sacraments, including matrimony...
...In offended response the little group flicks off the TV and sits momentarily in glum silence until one of them brings some soothing wine...
...Yet, the similarities to Pins XII were there--from an austere demeanor belied by a remarkable face-toface warmth (Montini used to prepare the "personal" remarks Pins would say to individuals at audiences) and the wide-ranging intellect down to the penchant both had for meticulously going over printers' galleys of official pronouncements, which led one frustrated peritus to crack of Paul VI during the Council, "What does he think he is, a managing editor...
...Yet again, in almost 45,000 words a copy, there is hardly a clue on the personality of the man, except that those sad eyes light up for children...
...These reservations notwithstanding,I propose the following thesis: Barring abbreviation by sudden death, the term of the new Pope will prove to be the most .crucial in modern Churchhistory, rivaled only by Pope John XXIII's...
...Now he can turn to his inner priesthood...
...Yet the letter makes me think that Montini had foreseen his own pontificate and the criticisms he would receive, as he steeled himself to hear, as the years went on, that he was a cold, indecisive, and intellectual "Hamlet," with no real feeling for the real or imagined sufferings of others--a poor family struggling to feed a too-quickly-growing household and saddled with Humanae Vitae as well...
...It may be argued that if Paul VI had been any stronger and more specific in his attacks on economicinjustice and, for example, the level of American violence in Vietnam--particularlyin requiringfollowthrough from American bishops---he would have undiplomatically "alienated his constituency...
...Then, at night, in the privacy of his chamber, he dons flowing white pajamas, unlocks an armoire which contains "his bones," and dances ecstatically till dawn...
...All day long he has given himself to his church, to the world...
...a cold and aloof young cleric so humorless that he had to learn what humor was by studying the reactions of his companions to jokes, but who in the 1920s somehow became emotionally alive as the spiritual advisor to students---some of them militantly anti-fascist--at the University of Rome...
...The young American playwright, John Guare, who grew up in Queens where the nuns in Saint Joan of Arc Grammar School yearned desperately to go to Rome and touch the Pope, built his play, The House of Blue Leaves, around the personal impact of the Pope's visit on a Queens family and three nuns waiting for him to drive by...
...From the summer of the encyclical to the fall of 1971, with the .issuance of the Third International Synod of Bishops' declaration on .the ordained priesthood, the Church showed the strains of conflict, tension, unrest, and anger...
...Meanwhile, he has expended his physical energies so generously, but most diplomatically, as a traveling symbol for peace--in a worldly arena where, as Jose] Stalin cynically but correctly observed, the Pope has no armed divisions...
...So much ugliness and hope...
...and, in the long run, he has inadvertently undermined the very authority he sought to uphold...
...He begins, "HIS Holiness Pope Paul VI is an ordinary saint...
...Yet, through the machinations of history where, as Hans Kfing says in The Church, "the Petrine ministry appeared to men to be more and more a Petrine dominion," the papacy has so evolved that we can almost say that we are personally closer to Peter than to his successor Paul VI...
...to get a [dace at the curb, fantasizes: "And right now, the Pope is flying through that star-filled sky, bumping planets out of the way, and he's asleep dreaming of the mobs waiting for him...
...When he reads news stories where he is urged to resign, we get "the prisoner": "The Lord created this, I certainly didn't...
...But Jesus said to Peter: You will be my disciple and upon you I will build my church...
...His argument that Pills measured his protest to avoid worse reprisals will remain, to many, unconvincing...
...The figure of the Pope functions in the play as the temporary, superstitious focal point of the family's other dreams-the American dreams of celebrity and success--while, to Guare, Paul VI's pleas for peace at the U.N...
...It's not easy to bear such a weight...
...Special Session on Disarmament were meant to counter any charge that the papacy had been silent in the face of another kind of holocaust...
...I suspect it will be the great paradox of Paul VI's reign that he seems to have taken his strongest--least "diplomatic"--disciplinary stands on those questions which have been most "personal"--the ones which for so many Americans touch most intimately on the individual's sense of himself or herself as a person, the sexual identity: the freedom of married couples to decide when and how to express their sexual love and determine the number of children they can have...
...a priest who wants to marry...
...Far from ending with the Pope's visit, the Vietnam war got worse as Lyndon Johnson, who had discussed the war with Paul VI in New York, expanded the war with his bombing campaign of the North...
...Meanwhile, change in papal style remains the stuff of melodramatic fantasyulike Morris West's novel-film The Shoes of the Fisherman where the AnthonyQuinnpeasant-Popeclimactically announces he will get rid of his wealth, or the recent Malachi Martin novel, The Final Conclave, where a young African cardinal makes an eleventh-hour plea for Vatican property to be put in an international, nondenominational lay trust fund, thus freeing the Pope to preach the Gospel, and so gets himself elected Pope...
...Yes, it would he easy to say, 'I don't want itI' Can't they understand this...
...ii AGENDAFORTHEPAPACY What the Church needs from the next Pope SHAKINGDOWN &SORTINGOUT FATHER RICHARD P. MCBRIEN is pro]essor o] theology at Boston College and director of its Institute ]or the Study of Religious Education and Service...
...Rather, he has become primarily a concept--once a man, now a symbol hoisted up on a sedia gestatoria to be carried on the shoulders of other men so crowds may see and cheer him...
...After 1970, Paul VI, for the most part, stayed home...
...Bunny will make a wish as the Pope passes---that Bananas Shaughnessy, Artie's insane wife, will die soon so she can marry Artie...
...And Bernard Weintaub wrote, "It was, in a sense, as if Fifth, Park, and Lenox Avenues and Queens Boulevard had stopped breathing as the frail visitor moved about...
...Did Christ have all this in mind...
...a boy about whom so few anecdotes survive---except that around the age of nine he both decided to become a journalist in imitation of his political-journalist father Giorgio Montini, and also fought a fist-fight with a boy who had tied an old pan to a cat's tail...
...1filll THEPOPE&THEAMERICANMIND RAYMONDA...
...He asked him to feed his sheep and expect a violent death...
...We're the creatures of their dreams...
...Many things are indeed important, and some things are even very important...
...But, at other moments, perhaps the aides have revealed more than they intended--particularly Paul's repeated laments, even to his closest associates, that he is misunderstood...
...In a very unusual short story, "Roman Ordinary," [Harpers',March1977],poetandnovelist John L'Heureux used fiction to both satirize the public image of Paul created by the standard day-in-the-life-of-thePope journalism that has been with us since Plus XII and, in a strange way, suggest a grim and exotic interpretation of the Pope's life...
...And was Montini's 1954 assignment to Milan an exile, a sign he had lost favor at court, or a chance for pastoral experience to prepare him for the papacy...
...And why did Plus offer them both red hats in such a way that they would have to refuse them...
...Finally there is a letter from the blind boy, promising prayer for his new "father...
...or an Earl Butz, the foulmouthed American Secretary of Agriculture who didn't want some celibate pontiff talking about population and how to distribute the world food supply...
...In his presence the hush seems utterly natural...
...And who cares...
...Milan seemed, for a while, a return to the pastoral excitement he had felt as a student chaplain: he called himself a priest of the workers, but not of the "left," as he launched his campaign to build 72 new prefabricated churches, preached his Christian philosophy of the dignity of work, clasped grimy hands in factories, slums and coal mines---though he surely looked incongruous in a mine shaft wearing an archbishop's crimson robes and a lace surplice and with a miner's helmet perched on his head, still the man of another time and world, the remote young priest discovering laughter or wading, sincerely seizing the symbol that might gain him respect in a foreign land...
...Commonweal:557 What could have been worse, than what Hitler did to the Jews...
...I was a Fordham senior who had just spent a year in France learning something about the alienation of the French people, particularly the workers, from the Church...
...But I think they meant it...
...Reacting to reviews of the play, in a long letter to the London Tablet [June 29, 1963] Montini protested that his former mentor was not a coward, not a "heartless solitary...
...Paul VI, ever sensitive and intelligent, knew that too...
...What did it mean that Montini accompanied Pins on his spontaneous tour of the Rome hit by Allied bombs...
...and--according to James Reston---~Washington listen~s something they didn't want to hear: that life is a "banquet" and it would be "irrational" to use birth control to reduce the "number of guests...
...When a Commonweal symposium, eight years ago [May 1, 1970], asked nine American church leaders "If you could make one change in the Church, what would it be?," the most dramatic--and, to some minds outlandish--replies came from Chicago's social-activist Monsignor John J. Egan and Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, and both cGnfronted the problem of the papacy...
...But he has earned his own sentence--"l love him as a member of the great human family . . ."--as his epitaph...
...Most of the piece is the familiar compilation of menus and audiences--including a highly emotional encounter with a bewildered, fatherless, blind boy whom Paul embraces and tells he is his "father...
...The thesis ,has to be explained against the 'background of :the pontificate just concluded.During the course of Pope Paul Vl's incumbency, the Catholic Church showed at least three different faces...
...When famous people go to sleep at night, it's us they dream of, Attic...
...And surely his .powerful words at the United Nations, October 4, 1965-- "lamais plus la guerre," cried in a voice we can still hear--and his "tomorrow may be too late" message to the June 1978 U.N...
...But events which alter the course of history ---even of a single nation or church--are truly rare, and they are unpredictable in any case...
...I remember that I cared...
...The conventionzd wisdom asserts that the new Pope should be like his predecessor, a moderate conservative...
...Paul VI was not exactly silent about Vietnam, he frequently anguished over it...
...Paul VI rode 24 miles through the city's sleasiest and most luxurious neighborhoods in a bubble-topped car as countless thousands waitedand watched--some irritated that the motorcade had whisked by too quicklymand said a low mass for 90,000 in Yankee Stadium at an altar which, American journalism was thoughtful enough to record, stood "171 feet from home plate...
...The New York Times was on strike when Paul VI came to New York, but its writers covered the visit anyway for a paperback book, The Pope's Journey to the United States (Bantam, 1965...
...but a man of "exquisite sensibility and the most delicate human sympathies," who "wished to enter fully into the history of his own afflicted time: with a deep sense that he himself was a part of that history, he wished to participate fully in it, to share its sufferings in his own heart and soul...
...And so, with the shouting having subsided and the rhetoric softened, the Church entered a period of quiet a~trition at a slower but inexorable pace...
...SCHROTH A view from the other shore It is one of the sad, and peculiar, images of modem history that, in the popular understanding of the papacy, the Vatican has become not just a fortress or a museum, but rather a prison, and the papacy itself-which should be the most liberating of divine-human institutions--seems a medieval iron maiden, or a ball and chain which the poor prisoner drags across the floor of his papal apartment to the window where he will summon from his agony a smile, from his worried mind a warning, and from his heart a blessing for the crowd below in Saint Peter's Square...
...for better or worse, allow the Pope to be known...
...Our governmental institutions, our free enterprise system, our personal liberties, our commitment to social justice, our standing in the forum of nations will somehow hang in the balance...
...Indeed, the question itself was posed before the bottom fell out of the "revolutions" of the 1960s, before the full impact of the post-Vatican H conservative backlash, and when liberal Catholics were more willing to believe Church authorities might act on their suggestions...
...departures from the priesthood and religious life increased...
...Church attendance and vocations fell...
...But Ronnie has gone AWOL with a mad scheme to slip into Yankee Stadium disguised as an altar boy to blow up the Pope...
...The 1 September 1978:558 Pope is no more real to their lives than Jackie Kennedy and Mayor Lindsay and the other celebrities who flicker on the TV screen...
...But that warmth, it seems, had to be put aside during most of his thirty years in the Vatican Secretariat of State, where his vocation was to silently submerge his personality in service of Pius XII...
...If I had been asked what I would have done as Pope: put on blue jeans, T-shirt and sneakers and walk out the Vatican front gates into the streets...
...They seem outlandish now because so many thoughtful people, either through disillusionment or cynicism, have given up any hope that the style of the papacy might radically change...
...All day long he does what he has to do, and at night he dances...
...Because of the way he chose to live and because of the way he understood his office, Giovanni Battista Montini will never be understood the way any human being as sensitive as himself would like to be understood...
...The thought flickers for a second through the papal consciousness, but His Holiness extinguishes it with a single bat of an eyelash...
...Yet, to be known as a person seems to be in contradiction to the way in which popes--and the palace guards who control their lives and even most of the journalists who write about them---understand the papal role...
...John Cogley, who flew with him from Rome, wrote, "Pope Paul VI is a man of resounding dignity and gravity...
...Does he want to hear the "inspired beauty" of Mary Magdalene's "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar or some Mozart...
...He probably had...
...The public imagination, unchallenged by his symbolic flights, could allow the old image of the unhappy Holy Father, "the prisoner," to reassert itself, particularly when he appeared at his window to lament the decline of public morals, the defection of priests, birth control, divorce, secularization and pornography--though the memory of the gentle, absolutely sincere man was too strong to disappear...
...But today's dominant imaginative preRAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., iS an a~sociate editor of Commonweal and an Associate Pro]essor in the Communications Department at Fordham University.occupation with the papacy seems to have been with the need to liberate the man who might be Pope from the institution of the papacy itself...
...It seemed evident "that his hour of glory was also an hour of special trial and that deep within himself he might have envied those popes who described themselves as 'prisoners of the Vatican,' even while he knew his mission is to go out to the world...
...if, somehow, I thought, a man who supported the worker-priests could become Pope we would have a Pope of the people again, a new Church...
...Yet, who thinks of the Pope as a free, individual human being...
...Although the 1971 synod spoke with exceeding wisdom and courage on the matter of social justice, its pronouncement on the priesthood made it clear that there would be, indeed there could be, no additional institutional reforms of any significance during the reign of Paul VI...
...this when a mind as keen and politically learned as his must know that in the second half of the twentieth century men carrying another man in a chair is a symbol of imperialism, or that when triumphant soccer players or politicians hoist their hero-comrades on their shoulders part of the symbol and joy is the physical contact with the human being...
...Around him he observes "everything is in the process of decay...
...All this in spite of the fact that the public usually wants its public figures to enjoy their power and their stardom, to live out as freely as they can the proper embodiment of what it means to be President of the United States, Prince of Wales, Ernest Hemingway, Roy Rogers or the primary living representative of Jesus Christ...
...Thus, a forthcoming preside~ialelection is conCxlenI.ly deseri'bed as the most critical election in U.S...
...And what of the moral authority that was lost...
...There he enjoyed for a while the reputation, encouraged by Time magazine, as the voice in the Pope's left ear, the defender of the French worker-priest experiment, while his cam-petitor, the gruff Monsignor ~uicoTardini, whispered in the fight...
...The famous ones---they're the real people...
...It is the loneliness-of-power, burdens-of-office syndrome--one encouraged by recent American Presidents (though not John F. Kennedy), political leaders, movie stars, famous writers and some European royalty in a natural desire to he loved and "understood" by their publics as well as held responsible for their power...
...Can't they give a little help or show a little care...
...We see a remote, frail, owl-eyed, sickly child who, in later life, would astonish his contemporaries by his capacity for work...
...How else will he be able to hold the Church together...
...Vatican-ws,tchers and gossips analyzed their relationship like today's Ftr-Eastern correspondents in Hang Kong picki~ up descriptions of wall posters from travelers from Communist China...
...He also told his U.N...
...Surely his emotional, ecumenical, physical embraces of non-C.atholicreligious leaders and his dramatic pilgrimages to the Holy Land, New York, Fatima, Ephesus, Bogota, Geneva, Kamala, Sardinia, Teheran, Bombay, Dacca, Manila, Page Page, Sydney, Djakarta, Hong Kong, Ceylon, and Italian cities, giving alms as he traveled, were meant to show that this Pope---and, in him, all Popes---was not a "heartless solitary" cut off from "the history of his own affiicted time...
...will stop the Vietnam war so his son Ronnie won't have to go...
...In his last months he once offered himself to take the place of a hijacking hostage and later, in another burst of feeling, escaped the papal "We" to plead with terrorists for the life of Aldo Moro: "I love him as a member of the great human family, as a brother in faith and a son of the Church of Christ...
...and his description in his Stadium homily of the American way of life as based on spiritual values are as realistic as zoo-keeper Attic's dreams of a song-writing career...
...This is doubly tragic because, while this most intelCommonweal:359 lectual of modern popes may have sincerely felt he was protecting the integrity and moral authority of the church by "unpopular" decisions, the weight of scholarly theological-z--notjustpopular--opinionwithinthe Church has not supported him...
...But if the Harpers' short story, with its weird ending, seemed outrageous, the publication of Curtis Bill Pepper's "A Day in the Life of the Pope" [New York Times Magazine, April 10, 1977] within a few weeks merely demonstrated how accurately L'Heureux had perceived and mimicked the mass media's perception of the Pope.Pepper obviously did not observe what he describes-Paul lying in bed in his white nightshirt as the bells of Rome awaken him at dawn--but constructed the "day," including rare direct quotes, from interviews with Paurs aides who probably thought they were doing their boss a favor by portraying him sympathetically...
...the first of the modern popes shares the dilemma Of modern man: He seeks solitude and silence, yet longs for the embrace of a brother...
...The end of the day approaches...
...When they played on the beach he would tuck up his cassock and romp through the surf as if, as one student remarked, "he had just discovered wading...
...Thus, Harvey Cox's fantasy wherein the Vatican and the World Council of Churches issue a joint encyclical, Lucrum Salax, in which they begin "forthwith to divest themselves of all earthly possessions" to give them to the poor, might be sniffed at as naive...
...But he remained too much, like Pius XII, the prudent diplomat to issue the clear ringing condemnation of American policy--particularly the bombing--that might have strengthened the American peace movement and shortened the war...
...What seems to matter is the symbol, the myth, the fact that he--as the embodiment of Christian ideals and as spokesman for universal mankind--is there...
...Alas, this seems so far from the familiar intimacy Jesus shared with the crowds that swarmed around him, touching him as often as they could, and from Peter the fisherman who, in the peculiar oral tradition of retreat-talk folklore, we know as a warm-hearted, passionate bungler who was reliable only most of the time--but somehow a "rock," a natural leader of men...
...Rome and Milan Unfortunately, reading two standard biographies of Giovanni Battista Montini~John G. Clancy's Apostle /or Our Time (Kenedy, 1963) and William E Barrett's Shepherd of Mankind (Doubleday, 1964)--does little to break the mystery of this man...
...the streams of visitors, little bureaucratic chores, the crowds outside the window: "Pilgrims are lined up waiting for a papal blessing, a sea of believers awash in their saris and doubleknits and platform shoes...
...As a group politicians are not remarkable for their sense of history...
...He must steer the same middle course, suffering 1 September 1978:560...
...and I remember how disappointed I was when, as a Jesuit novice convinced that the Church needed the austere Montini, the conclave came up with someone named Roncalli who was obviously overweight...
...The biting story details the Pope's rising, prayers and diet--granola, tea, a single sweet roll, lamb's tongue, a single caramel, a single glass of wine...
...From 1963, with only one of four couneit sessions completed, ur~til 1968, with the publication of Humanae Vitae, the Church seemed marked by excitement, even enthusiasm...
...Then Paul, saddened at being misunderstood, explains his position on women to his priest-secretary by talking about the respective roles of his own mother and father, his mother's emphasis on prayer, his father's on action...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 17
