The Pope & politics

...What had not been anticipated was that the pope would venture so deeply into two political minefields...

...The reception he got from a crowd which was made up mainly of Northern Ireland Catholics provided unchallengeable evidence of the rejection of violence by the Irish people and their deep longing for peace...

...But we hope the conversation will not proceed on the mistaken assumption, shared by all toomany tired liberals, conservatives and radical critics, that the war on poverty was a failure...

...They kept lining them up and waiting for someone to make a flick...

...Proposals tO restructure the system deserve hearing and debate, which they will receive in these pages...

...Ireland, after years of agonizing and party political convolutions, recently passed a bill to legalize the sale of contraceptives (though only to married persons and only on a doctor's prescription...

...presence in Vietnam, but when it did Kissinger and Ford were still waiting for the non-existent dominoes to drop...

...So here they are again...

...Handing on the Faith in the Home," designed to encourage parents to share more fully in the religious education of their children...

...If you had doubts of the U.S.inteUigence ability vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, would any part of the Cuban affair reassure you...

...And for the pope to say that "the very possibility of divorce in the sphere of civil laws makes stable and permanent marriages more difficult for everyone" and to call on the Irish always to support marriage "through personal commitment and through positive social and legal action" was seen as a deliberate political intervention of a kind which the Irish bishops themselves would no longer attempt on their own...

...abominate abortion...

...Useful as the president's address w~, however, the great 9 Cuban scare has done serious damage to this coOntry's rational handling of foreign policy and has demonstrated the growing power of the new Right in this country...

...Times, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown fronts for his band of renown, the Joint Chiefs, explaining how the diagram of three Lionel toy train layouts will bamboozle the dread Russians into not knowing where the MX missiles actually are and thus reduce Soviet adventurism to Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire out of sheer frustration...

...SMALL FUTURE...

...They prefer practical admonitions...

...They now plan a pastoral program...

...But neither does the mixed record of the Great Society warrant the timidity and negativism that currently retard needed and possible progress in achieving equal opportunity for all young Americans...

...do not practice contraception...

...One well-known Irish commentator privately summed up the pope's "mistake" as "his assumption that the Irish religious and spiritual experience is as monochrome as that in his own native Poland...

...All in all, the Cuban affair obviously represented a failure in intelligence, and in more than one sense of that word...

...There is a belief in Ireland that ff Senator Edward Kennedy becomes U.S...

...One main theme ran through the five major addresses he made in Ireland--the dignity of the human person...

...Accordingly, Richard H. deLone, a former associate director of the Carnegie Council on Children, has written for his former employer a stinging attack oh Great Society educational programs...

...So for the pope to call for "generous openness to accept children from God" and for respect for "the God-given cycle of life" was seen as a clear admonition against contraception Commonweal: 582and a rebuke to the government's new legislation...

...Faced with this right-wing challenge at home, Senator Church now seems intent on running'against Castro the next time around, giving all aid and comfort to those fellowsenators who would hold the SALT treaty hostage to an impossible-to-achieve solution in Cuba...

...So caught up were the crowds with the emotion of the occasions that, for the most part, the content of the pope's messages did not register...

...Levitan and Robert Taggart reassessed the data and analyses of 1960s programs and concluded, much against their original suspicions, that the results were impressive...

...God knows he spoke the sober truth when he said, "the greatest danger to American security is certainly not the two or three thousand Soviet troops in Cuba...

...He told them what to do--go to Confession frequently...

...wear distinctive, non-secular clothing if you are a priest or nun...

...These judgments of modest success in equalizing power and experience surely do not justify complacency...

...On the front page of theN.Y...

...Interpreting recent Kissingerian statements as a statesman without a state, one can only befieve he still is waiting for the domino drop, while Ford wants only to be acquitted of knowing anything that was going on in Cuba when he was president...

...His speeches were solid and read better than they sounded...

...That will affect the way I examine and judge his message...

...The IRA's military wing bluntly rejected his plea, claiming that it had "widespread support" for its campaign and that "force is the only means of removing the evil of the British presence in Ireland...

...They were playing Go, the well-known Asiatic game, highly unstructured, in which equally valued stones are placed to surround and cut off equally valued stones of the opposition...

...Whoever advised the pope did not take that into account...

...oppose the legalizing of divorce...

...For "controversial" read "startling" or even "shocking...

...He was about a century out...

...He championed the rights of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland: "Each human gommunity--ethnic, historical, cultural, or religious--has rights which must be respected...

...gatherings, either personally or on television, will have no need for descriptions of the Irish occasions--the huge crowds (it is reckoned that half the 4.6 million people in the whole island attended one or other of the ceremonies), their patient good-humor, theirrapport with the pope, the moving incidents which brought tears to lais an/d many other eyes, such as when he told 250,000 young people at Galway that he loved them and they cheered him deliriously for 12 solid minutes...

...say the Rosary...

...The pope's second sally into the political area was less enthusiastically received...

...Ian Paisley, predictably, branded the pope as a hypocrite, an anti-Christ and a liar...

...Given all this, President Carter's eventual address to the nation was useful enough even though he did not even try to explain the intelligence-gathering failure that was at the root of the crisis...

...Even as the Aer Lingus "St...

...pray fervently...

...The magnetic Pole," as a television production assistant called him, won all hearts...

...In 1976, Sar.A...

...Injustice and' violence weaken the moral fiber of a nation, he told the biggest crowd of his visit in Dublin...

...The old Scottish song, "Will ye no' come back again," which the crowds sang to his departing helicopter, might have been his own theme song, admonishing "Ireland semperfidelis," to return to her traditional Christian doctrines, disciplines and practices...

...It said it wanted direct contact with the pope to discuss the Northern Ireland problem and welcomed his "genuine interest in achieving true peace based on justice...

...Jack Lynch, who got less notice than any of the bishops who, in turn, got much less notice than any uncomprehending infant thrust forward for a papal kiss or bear-hug...

...IAmerican readers who saw the U.S...

...The Irish Government was delighted with what it interpreted as full papal support for its policy on Northern Ireland, which is to press for a devolved government formed from representatives of both Protestant and Catholic communities...

...Ireland is far more of a pluralist society than seemed to be envisaged in the pope's admonition to its people, such as to "love the land...

...Was this, perhaps, the background to the pope's seeming off-handedness with the Taoiseach, Mr...

...In the euphoria of the occasion, the religions correspondent of one newspaper estimated that it would be a hundred years before the full significance of the pope'e addresses become apparent...

...As Carl Sandburg observed, "A child is God's opinion the world should go on...

...He admonished sympathizers with extremists not to allow their moral sense and Christian conviction to be blunted by the "lie of violence...

...by Stephen Thernstrom and again by Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan point to the significant effect of education in enabling children to transcend their social origins...

...But aside from this failure, the address was good, calm in tone and non-belligerent, explicitly eschewing a return' to the Cold War and rattling the saber no more than he apparently thought was absolutely necessary to appease assorted fire-eating senators...

...In the event, that's what happened to the U.S...

...To the extent that the medium is the message, the pope's own personality will inevitably play some part in the way his words will be studied and applied...

...The 1960s programs and policies and their continuation had a massive, overwhelming beneficial impact and.., the weight of evidence convincingly supports this view...

...For if the number of the other America is now down from 39 million in 1960, there are still 25 millions suffering from chronic impoverishment...

...Thus far, the evidence simply does not support this conclusion, nor the picture of American social immobility...

...But these are general exhortations and the Irish, whatever other virtues they possess, are not philosophers...

...Respect human life from conception to death, he told Irish families...

...Patrick" was taxiing on the Shannon tarmac for the flight to Boston, a television commentator was reflecting on the pope's "controversial" statements on contraception and divorce...

...Dominoes turned out to he played by matching the numbers, one to one, and trying to get rid of all your pieces before the opponent gets rid of his...

...Engineered by liberals who focus blame or help on individuals, such policy, deLone argues, ignored harsh economic reality and racial lines which doom millions to a fixed class and make equal opportunity an hallucination...

...From the first irresponsible reaction of Senator Church linking the matter to SALT to the later hyperfervent bombast of Senator Jackson, the "Cuba crisis" seems in fact to have been artificial, existing largely in the minds of the president and other of our leaders in Washington and mishandled from the very fn'st...

...What the long-term response of the Irish.people will be is another matter...

...Killing degrades you, he told the IRA...

...I I Report from Ireland THE POPE & POLITICS TWO SALLIES INTO SENSI3P/E AREAS l IN ALL ITS EXTERNALS the pope's visit to Ireland, as his I subsequent one to the U.S., was an incredible success...

...The apparent concept of the Irish as a rural and, therefore, ingenuous people hardly fits the reality...

...And the pope did not disappoint them...

...Would the normally responsible Senator Frank Church of the Foreign Relations Committee have taken the chauvinist tack he did if he were not facing a despicable right-wing campaign against him in his bid for reelection in Idaho--a campaign financed by big money raised by the new right-wing masters of direct-mail fundraising...

...Of course, this is a superficial and incomplete account of what the pope said in Ireland...

...I have seen the pope here and felt very 26 October 1979:581close to him...

...The visit had been described as a "pastoral" one, so the emphasis on religious observance was to be expected from a pope known to be conservative in outlook (though the degree of his conservativeness is, perhaps, better known now...

...But all the other parties addressed by the pope were peripheral to his central approach--the plea to the IRA to stop their campaign...

...We have a more pluriform and variegated religious and cultural background...

...Never occurred to the Pentagon that's how you play dominoes...

...Since we pay for their play, our bills will be higher than they need have been to give the generals, admirals and contractor's their salutary workouts...

...president, the pope will make another visit there and come again to Ireland en route, though next time to the North...

...Materialism will corrupt you if you allow it to, he told Irish youth...

...Do not demean your calling by yielding to secularism, he told priests, religious and seminarians...

...Condemnation of violence had been expected...

...It was enough that he was there with them: what he was saying in his slow, measured addresses could be thought about later...

...But the pope went further...

...The solution: more government intervention to redistribute power and experience in the social system...

...Inevitably, however, only a minority of people will read through the dense columns of type to study and analyze the text...

...Peace is threatened every time these rights are violated...

...Last time, you may recall, they called it "dominoes," in the curious belief that dominoes was played by lining up the numbered pieces, totally, ignoring the numbers, and knocking down the f'u'st to knock down all the others...

...DESMOND FISHER (Desmond Fisher is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Ireland...

...One he negotiated with stiperh skill: the other triggered off some muffled explosions which will undoubtedly produce future eruptions...

...Once more the Pentagon has got the wrong name of the game they're playing...

...Ulster Unionists grudgingly found words of praise for the pope's courageous and balanced views (though the Rev...

...Undoubtedly, the bishops, following .the pope's lead, see this as a way of reviving the traditional forms of belief and the devotional practices which have marked Irish Catholicism...

...The significance had escaped nobody...

...And here the pope failed...

...He called for a new "peaceful political initiative" in Northern Ireland so that the politicians could prove that peaceful means and not violence could solve injustices...

...The In'st political intervention was at Drogheda, where the pope made his impassioned plea to the IRA: "On my knees, I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and return to the ways of peace . . . . Further violence in Ireland will only drag down to ruin the land you claim to love and the values you claim to cherish...

...Well, bless them, dominoes turned out not to be played like that at all...

...For the children of the current 25 million poverty-stricken Americans, these programs, we are informed, achieved "small future" (the study's title...

...This was the positive thrust running through his closelylinked series of addresses...

...The Irish bishops are, of course, gratified by the success of the visit and by the pope's reinforcement of the views they themselves have promulgated, somewhat less forcibly, in recent years...

...I don't think I'm going to like everything he said," one of the stewards remarked as the papal plane left...

...Of several minds: Frank Getlein I I i I lltl NAME OF THE GAME FROM DOMINOES TO lIONEL TRAINS T HEY'VE DONE it again...

...By then, the effects of his first visit will be more clear-cut...

...President Jimmy Carter, like Brown a cheerful Charlie McCarthy for the Pentagon's brass and braid, is quoted in the 26 October 1979:583...

...Most will be content with what they heard over the fitful public address systems or on radio and television...

...It is not certain that they will succeed...

...By refusing even a ceasef'Lre or a temporary truce to give the politicians another chance to find a nonviolent way of ending injustice and sectarian division, the IRA misjudged the mood of the people...

...Ireland is rapidly industrializing, and the commercialism and materialism against which the pope warned are challenges which must be confronted rather than escaped from...

...He has thus given the principle of collegiality a new dimension which will have major consequences for the church...

...By UN decree, this is the year of the child...

...Worse, itnever occurred to the Pentagon that the other folks weren't playing dominoes at all...

...But it won't be the same as with a remote pope speaking in Rome...

...The political wing was a little more subtle...

...The pope has shown quite clearly that he believes in strong leadership and that his view of collegiality involves not only recognition that the other bishops share responsibility for the whole church with him but that he shares responsibility for their dioceses as well...

...love the work of the fields...

...Moreover, previous studies of social mobility in the U.S...

...The greatest danger to all the nations of the world--including the United States and the Soviet Union--is the breakdown of a common effort to preserve the peace, and the ultimate threat of a nuclear war...

...Despite the IRA's rejection of his plea, the pope's Drogheda address was the unqualified success of his Irish visit...

...And there have been moves to call a referendum to remove from the Constitution Article 41.3.2 which provides that "no law shall be enacted providing for the grant of a dissolution of marriage...

...Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, announced that her government was working to find a way of giving the people of Northern Ireland more responsibility for their own affairs and their own future...