Editorials
O'Gara, James
THE POPE & POLITICS IN CENTRAL AMERICA Landing IN Central America's passiontide at the beginning of this month, Pope John Paul II kissed the ground. It has become his trademark. Immediately he...
...Is this abstracted idealism or, as the Economist wrote, "a helpless plea...
...It helps a bit when he warns clergy and church leaders to avoid a kind of politics he terms "partisan" - but only a bit...
...Safire, who is a laissez-faire kind of conservative, doesn't want religion and politics "poaching" on the same terrain...
...It was this "sorrowful clamor," he said, "that I would like to give voice to with my visit...
...Reagan, unlike the pope, is willing to look...
...Should the pope have gone to Central America...
...But the truth is that secularists have not discarded all the values of our civilization...
...Lewis had reflected a bit before writing this paragraph: "Any President is entitled to give uplifting talks about moral or spiritual questions...
...Ronald Reagan delivered a remarkable address to the National Association of Evangelicals, and was promptly applauded and criticized for all the wrong reasons...
...Like Anthony Lewis, Mr...
...It retains much of the Vatican's traditional top-down style...
...It's easier to rule the president out of order than look at what he said...
...There is nothing wrong in pointing up on moral grounds, as the president did, the evil of totalitarian leaders or the folly of appeasement or the spiritual nature of today's crisis or even the weaknesses of the nuclear freeze...
...to maintain the church's rejection of both the injustice of "pure economic capitalism" and the collectivism of one-party vanguards...
...The truth is that secularists and churchpeople, rather than holding radically different value systems, have been all too apt to live by exactly the same lights...
...Or is it the consequence of hearing the voices of those caught in the middle and wanting, through liturgical gesture, through admonitions, through the very gathering of crowds, to translate that "sorrowful clamor" into a murmur of hope...
...There are other criticisms that might be made of this papal trip...
...The problem is not that, a Christian president addressing a Christian audience, he talked morality, and in vaguely Christian terms...
...Example: the sharp contrast that the president drew between his audience-"you who are keeping America great by keeping her good"-and the followers of "modern-day secularism" who have discarded "the tried and time-tested values upon which our civilization is based," whose "value system is radically different from that of most Americans...
...Pretty sectarian...
...He was purporting to apply religious concepts to the contentious technical particulars of arms programs...
...The fact is that in a context like Central America's - or like Poland's next June - John Paul II's every act is politically charged...
...The president is in favor of traditional values-so is the pope...
...The Economist's realism, as so frequently, is far from realistic...
...That was in the sentence, "There is sin and evil in the world, and we are enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might...
...try rereading that passage substituting "church leader" and "Catholic hierarchy" and "the National Conference of Catholic bishops...
...The pope's vision of the church is both energizing and disturbing...
...Immediately he spoke of "a clamor that rises from these lands," as if, ear to earth, he had heard the voices of the voiceless caught amidst the fires of violence...
...Lewis was merely putting the same handcuffs on the president that conservatives would like to see put on the bishops...
...Dominating John Paul's journey was the effort to maintain some open space amidst the terrible violence - to keep the church from falling back into accommodation with oligarchies or from being coopted by Marxist-Leninists...
...Those italics are ours, not his...
...He called upon the evangelicals to do anything but repent...
...In denouncing murder, torture, and kidnapping in Guatemala even while greeting General Rios Montt, was the pope rebuking the Guatemalan head of state sharply, as some reports put it, or gently, as others saw it...
...Must there really be only one "focus of evil in the modern world...
...When C.S...
...Let clerics be clerics and let the president be president...
...Adding to the confusion is the ambiguity that remains about the political dimensions of papal journeys like this one...
...Did he succeed...
...Only at one point did the president venture beyond references to the "Judeo-Christian tradition" and the Supreme Being of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence...
...The pope risked exploitation by local politicians, who could filter his messages through their government-controlled media, and what might he gain to offset the risk...
...The pope's experience tells him that an embattled situation demands a disciplined, unified church...
...The truth is that the sources of erosion of traditional values-the president dwelled on sexuality and abortion-go far deeper than Mr...
...The president was applauded because, in striking contrast to the pope, he said exactly what his audience wanted to hear...
...Lewis has a very low threshold for "sectarian religiosity...
...Outside of a rather self-congratulatory comment on the past struggle for racial justice in America, the president saw very little but good in America's own heart...
...Lewis wrote of modern evil being "conceived and ordered...
...in clear . . . well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices," is it fair to think that Lewis imagined all those well-lit offices and quiet men to be on the other side of the Oder-Neisse line...
...If there is anything that should be illegitimate in the American system, it is such use of sectarian religiosity to sell a political program...
...One cannot help thinking that many of the themes that so distinguish John Paul - and distinguish him in particular from certain nineteenth-century predecessors - were introduced into Catholic ranks by individuals who might not be tolerated, let alone welcomed, by the pope's vision of church...
...Can the concept of good and evil determine whether 10,000 nuclear warheads is enough...
...Assume that the President is 100 percent right about morality or that the clergy is 100 percent right about foreign policy...
...Why the grueling pace...
...Did the pope's emphasis on church unity and hierarchical authority in Nicaragua put the church definitively on a collision course with the Sandinista government and signal a break with the base communities of the "popular church...
...and the extraordinary behavior of the Sandinistas in politicizing the pope's arrival, in trying to exclude Archbishop Obando y Bravo from the public eye as much as possible, and in allowing hecklers access to the public address system during the pope's homily, indicates exactly how embattled the situation in Nicaragua is becoming...
...For the rest of the world, the papal allocutions and gestures pile up, one on top of another, until the whole is a jumble...
...But how to apply it in a specific instance, most notably in Nicaragua, with the conflict between"popular church" and hierarchy, is another matter...
...But about the rest, the problem was less with what he said than what he didn't say...
...We also wish Mr...
...If the applause was easy and predictable, so was the criticism...
...But the real problem is that Mr...
...PRESIDENTIAL PULPIT The pope was not the only world leader to foray into religion and politics at the beginning of March...
...The fact that each is playing in the other's ballpark is what is wrong...
...It's true that putting political arguments in any proximity to God-talk always presents certain dangers...
...It is important that the biggest crowds Central America has known came out not to celebrate any of the region's reigning hatreds, but to declare that fidelity to the Gospel was ultimate and that the Gospel will not provide social cement for any of the lockjawed options Central America is embattled over...
...No one noticed...
...What both these opinions do is look for a shortcut...
...That's where the comparison ends...
...Despite the difficulties of stepping a narrow line between left and right, between the search for justice and "partisan politics," between preaching reconciliation and firming the ranks, the pope did succeed in Central America...
...The pope urges social justice, he calls for peace, he denounces violence, he warns against ideological manipulation - and he eschews politics...
...John Paul II did not bring a ten-point peace plan in his suitcase - nor has he the divisions to enforce it...
...Whether a nuclear freeze is likely to make the world more or less safe...
...That is the general truth...
...No walking a fine line here, no discomforting of both right and left, no braving his audience...
...asked the London Economist, and its own answer seemed to be "no...
...The normally admirable columnist Anthony Lewis declared that the speech was "outrageous" and "primitive...
...Well, it sounded enough that way to provoke Ambassador Hinton into swiftly warning against wishful interpretations of the pope's message...
...Reagan was doing something very different...
...Dialogue within the church is as necessary as dialogue among political factions if Central America is going to emerge better from the current turmoil...
...And he closed, incidentally, with a quotation from that notorious enemy of biblical religion, "one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine...
...But no more than that...
...Besides being an affront to the pope's health, these flying stops allow little time for the kind of exchange and observation that simply cannot be reproduced in official reports to the Vatican...
...But Mr...
...The enemy is within the gates.within the gates...
...We think the latter...
...Was he calling for negotiations - "dialogue" - between the government and the insurgents in El Salvador...
...About the likely consequences of the freeze and the merits of his own administration's program of arms negotiations, we believe, the president is factually wrong...
...But basically Mr...
...That connection was made a few days later by William Safire, Lewis's conservative counterpart among New York Times columnists...
...Reagan was not "100 percent right...
...But there are other ways of building peace...
...Safire added a little ignorance to the confusion, misrepresenting in several ways the Catholic bishops' pastoral letter on nuclear arms...
...The trouble," wrote the Economist, "is that he had nothing constructive to offer in the way of suggestions to stop the killing...
...His address to the evangelicals was filled with half-truths...
...Safire is willing to tolerate a little uplift: "politicians are entitled to their 'personal' ethical or moral stands...
...indeed, secularists have frequently maintained some of these values more determinedly than Christians...
...Now we would not deny the serious differences between believers and modern secularists...
...Each gesture and sentence of the pope was scrutinized for its implications...
Vol. 110 • March 1983 • No. 6
