EDITORIALS
MOURNING FOR AN UNKNOWN POPE It is easier to mottrn the death of Pope John Paul I than to assess his brief reign. Those who know the Vatican well are saying that, with a few symbolic gestures, he...
...the process of introducing resolutions has been made unnecessarily difficult...
...In all this sifting of portents, there was something .'both embarrassing and misleading...
...Consider the opportunity the Democrats seem determined to lose at their mid-term conven.tion, scheduled for Memphis this December...
...That is why we mourn not only a man but a Pope, however known...
...That is why it grieves on .this occasion and why it is so sorely disappointed on other occasions...
...There is a connection between John Paul's death and chose many others...
...The chairman of the program and agenda committee has been heard to insist that there must he "no embarrassmerR" to the President...
...Had such a convention been the practice earlier--so the argument went--the Johnson administration might have avoided the blood-let,ring of 1968...
...No doubt the simple fact of human idemification with this humble individual has played a great part in the world's grief...
...We followed, first with eagerness and then with a growing sense of the ridiculous, the strenuous attempts to discover who he was...
...and there will be no voting on resolutions until the last session of an extended weekend agenda...
...It stands before the world as a reminder of that impossible claim that the lives and sufferings of all, Iranians, Indians, Nicaraguans, the obscure and the powerful, the victims of earthquakes, of floods, of dictators--even the dictators themselves--can .be transformed, in this world and beyond it, .by self-giving love...
...The...
...Embarrassing because it reflected a church still not candid about the conflicts of viewpoint and the complexity of deliberation that lie behind its official, postures...
...It's obvious what he means, bat from a different perspective, perhaps one more democratic as well as Democratic, the meeting is already an embarrassment to the President...
...In India floods washed away thousands...
...And that is what the cardinals should keep in mind when they assemble, as the church and humanity always do, to begin again...
...If a clod be, washed Commonweal: 643 away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were...
...He smiled, his father was a socialist, he rejected the tiara for a simple stole, he spoke informally at his audience...
...The hope of a revived party has since faded, and though the Democrats are now almost a permanent majority in Congress they are as subject as Republicans to pessimistic pronouncements abom the decline of political parties, and the corresponding fragmentation of the citizenry into special interests and single-issue lobbies...
...But that is not the full answer...
...MEMPHIS BLUES One of the unfulfilled promises of Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign was the pledge to mobilize a broad-based, active Democratic party and bring it to bear on the maneuverings of Washington "insiders...
...That is why the world looks so intently, despite all its differences of belief, at Rome...
...13 October 1978:644...
...Many causes have been adduced for this decline, but no small part of the blame should rest on the political parties themselves...
...Is it then as a man, and not as a pope--as the holy pastor he so clearly was and not .the pastor he might yet have been--that we mourn Albino Lueiani...
...The first Democratic mid-~term convention was held in 1974, the idea being that without the pressure of choosing and running a candidate, the party could debate issues candidly and take stock on its own policies...
...Those who know the Vatican well are saying that, with a few symbolic gestures, he may have left a mark on the papacy that is nearly indelible...
...in Nicaragua a dictator methodicaUy massacred his way back to .power...
...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind...
...As for the scheduled workshops, the Democratic National Committee has shown no tendenzy toward giving anyone but administration loyalists a role on .the presiding panels...
...And this exercise was misleading besides, first because it so often assumed the premise that a good and holy man would necessarily be a good pope, a premise that history has belied, as recently as the .reign of Saint Plus X; and second because the reading of portents was almost always colored by the desperate longing of everyone that the new pope fit their own particular model of the leader tha, t would best serve ~he church and world...
...It is a fact that in our time the papacy, once the very symbol of reaction among the enligl~tened, has become a symbol of universal hope...
...pledge was not made so much in words as in the memorable sight of Carter sharing the Convention podium with representatives of party factions that had, since 1965, been bitterly at war with one another...
...Though the '74 convention was an aid to Carter's nomination--it demonstrated that the "old guard" had not reappropriated party leadership in the wake of McGovern's defeat--today the administration is apparently set on reducing the 1978 mid-term meeting to a useless formality...
...What with the secrecy of the conclave and the official reticence .to admit openly the pluralky of opinion in the church, observers were reduced to poring over the new pope's words and gestures in a manner more ,typical of the coverage of regimes in Moscow and Peking...
...The number of elected delegate, s has bnee reduced by a third from 1974, decreasing the strength of dissident viewpoints...
...In the days before John Paul's sudden death, tens of thousands of Iranians were destroyed by an earthquake, hundreds of their fellow citizens were killed by their own leader's troops...
...For most of us, .however, Albino Luciani was an unknown pope...
...as Patriarch of Venice, he had urged parishes to dispose of their jewels, he liked to vcal,k and bicycle and even, Time gravely reported, "carrying a cake in a pink box . . . once walked 25 minutes . . . to the meeting of an ecumenical commission...
...All these deaths diminish us...
...Since resolutions can only be passed by a majority of delegates elected rather than a majority still present, this last arrangemen~ t neatly rules out any actions at odds with ac~m.inistration policy...
...Do we eurn our attention to one death only because, in that case, we knew the man's name and his character and, in the other cases, the individuals are lost in obscurity...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 20
