New Constantinianism
Garvey, John
cause, the dissenters could communicate with the West via the American diplomats stationed in Kiev and the Western journalists sure to follow. In a word, dissident isolation from the world...
...When people speak of Christian politics I feel queasy...
...And what is right if not Jesus Christ's own program for decent government...
...There are echoes here of the Grand Inquisitor, and of Peter's betrayal: Velasco nudged the old Indian's shoulder and pushed him in front of the Japanese...
...4. Finally, the 634,154 Jews in the Ukraine would benefit from a U.S...
...We' ve had enough of it - - too much of it, in fact...
...That something good is being done for me in Jesus's name whether I like it or not bothers me, whatever the ideology of the person who is doing me this heavy favor...
...Are all your people pleased with this...
...The headman stared at the ground...
...Many Americans know about losif Begun, who was recently tried in Moscow, but how many have heard of Yuri Tarnopolsky, imprisoned in Kharkov...
...I am sure that all the Indians who have become Christians are happy...
...9 March 1984:135 They don't understand that a truth which is not discovered or encountered personally, or at the level of experience, is hardly a truth at all, but a memorized fact, a right answer to be offered the interrogator and not something real which grows in us, as truth does...
...granted that its beginnings will be full of false starts, it has in some ways the marks of the kind of theology we have been taught to respect, one which develops from the grass roots and rises...
...There is a form of liberation theology which is Constantinian religion in a new guise...
...And to speak Spanish...
...The attention which liberation theology has brought to the question of systemic evil, and our responsibility for social as well as personal moral questions, is entirely right...
...In a word, dissident isolation from the world would lessen...
...What is government for if it is not to make things right...
...Should their deaths, because they were brave and because they occurred in countries given to Catholic iconography, be invested with a religious significance which tends to drive away questions which Christians must ask if they are to remain honest...
...Si, Padre...
...What does worry me is an attitude which can be found floating next to ideas like the "People's Church" and some of what I have seen written about "the opD URING THE POPE'S visit to Central America there were reports, in the Nation and other places, of a conflict involving Nicaragua's "People's Church" more or less versus the Papal Church -- and stick figures were drawn to illustrate both...
...PEOPLE'S CHURCH OR MORAL MAIORITY revolutionary Russia...
...Si, Padre.'" Somewhere in the village a cock crowed, and from the corner of the square a throng of naked children stiffly observed this facsimile of a trial...
...But it is important that the results of that attention do not lead to a new form of a recurrent Christian problem...
...It is important to distrust those who know what is good for you...
...The same is true of the person who oppresses me, and not only me, but my children as well...
...Certainly not Americans, Ukrainians, and Jews...
...While this is hardly going to stop the KGB from cracking down, it may give Andropov's successors second thoughts about the best way of approaching their dissident problem...
...The "Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public" has been let loose on Soviet Jewry, antiSemitic propaganda has been intensified, repression of refuseniks has increased, and Jewish emigration has all but Of several minds: I I John Garvey I stopped...
...It is easy for the pacifist to turn it against the warmonger - - "You must love the Russians...
...And those people, many if not most of them poor, who identify their Christianity with the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe rather than with the latest pieth created by the revolution must be reeducated to see religion rightly...
...Si, Padre...
...Are your people happy that you have abandoned the mistaken beliefs of your ancestors and heard the teachings of the true God...
...But, unfortunately, all of this is theory...
...Velasco questioned him like a priest hearing a child's catechism...
...If it is just to redistribute the land, let it be done in the name of a justice which can be agreed upon by Christians, Jews, and agnostics...
...Velasco turned triumphantly towards the Japanese...
...We have learned to read and write...
...In practice, both Presidents Caner and Reagan have shown that they have little appreciation for the vast opportunities that the Soviet "'nationality question" offers United States diplomacy...
...I do not want to defend the role of the Catholic church in the present or past history of Latin America, or the behavior of John Paul II or any previous pope...
...What are the minuses...
...Like Ukrainian dissidents, Jewish refuseniks would more easily be able to publicize their plight and maintain a lifeline to the West...
...And then there are Catholics who believe that the People's Church represents an important new development in the evolution of Christianity...
...All of these points of view are held against the backdrop of a complicated history of oppression, much of it sanctioned or at the very least tolerated by the Catholic church...
...it is tragic...
...If I were a Jew in Nicaragua, or in any country where social change and the will of God ran the risk of being equated, I would worry...
...he stood stiffly before them like a nervous child...
...The picture is, of course, a little more complicated than that...
...NEW CONSTANTINIANISM...
...consulate in Kiev outweigh the costs of a Soviet consulate in New York...
...The command to love your enemies is total and unconditional...
...Those who believe that the state (whether it is Sandinist or Reaganite) ought to put their programs into effect are impatient with those who question the instrumentality of coercion...
...A consulate in New York -- which means a few more spies to supplement those already at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations...
...In arguing my point I am a little uncomfortable, because what I say can be used selectively and I certainly don't intend that -- I am not arguing for an option for the rich, or suggesting that the previous indifference of Christians to the violence and oppression created by unjust economic systems was at all justified...
...but harder for the pacifist to turn it against himself: he must love (that is, he must have genuine compassion for and learn to suffer with) the warmonger, a state of being which can have nothing to do with condescension and which means that ultimately the warmonger will be seen as something rather more complicated than a warmonger...
...They might also read Shusako Endo's fine novel The Samurai (Hfirper & Row, 1982), which offers this description of a staged encounter between Japanese visitors and Latin American Indians who are being shown off by those who have colonized them...
...Minimally, a Kiev consulate would provide invaluable moral assistance to this beleaguered Soviet minority...
...I am not arguing that what he owns _9 should not perhaps be taken - - but not in the name of Jesus, rather in the name of justice...
...But it is not in Christian terms that what the landowner has may be taken from him by force...
...The unfortunate fact of life here below is that any allegiance to any form of politics which allows itself armies, jails, state-sanctioned death, or coercion of any sort involves the separation of human beings from one another, the suspending of the obligation to love, and even where this is considered to be absolutely necessary for the sake of justice it is a matter to be mourned...
...ALEXAPqDER J. MOTYL (Alexander J. Motyl, a preceptor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, is the author of numerous articles on Soviet and East European affairs...
...What have you people learned from the padres who come here...
...it may mean the institution of prayer in the public schools or the placing of a picture of the martyrs of the revolution in every classroom...
...Si, Padre...
...John Paul II's manners in Nicaragua may have been perfectly terrible...
...but that resistance is a matter of tragedy, a sign of our distance from what we are called to be, and not ever an occasion for religious celebration...
...That may mean jailing the pornographer or seizing the landowner's estate...
...Surely, the benefits of a U.S...
...It is the church's duty to preach this, and its failure to do so is one of its past sins...
...There arc people who are cynical enough to use the People's Church for that purpose...
...Perhaps one must be moved to resistance...
...And how to sow seeds and cultivate a field...
...It is important to recognize that they have killed in that belief as well...
...it is not significantly different from what the Moral Majority is saying...
...Exile to the West may be considered less damaging to the USSR's image than imprisonment in Siberia...
...Christian politics in the past gave us the Inquisition and the Crusades, Cromwell's genocide, conversion at the point of a sword, and all the rest of it...
...Who wins...
...Christian considerations may move us to the pursuit of justice, but the identification of a particular political agenda with Christianity is dangerous...
...on the other side was the reactionary, heavily clerical Papal Church, identified with the establishment and oppression...
...And particularly now, the need for American support is urgent and growing...
...What do the Soviets get in return...
...Christ calls for conversion, and in Christian terms the landowner s~ould give what he does not need to the poor...
...The most shocking scandal at Christianity's heart is that Jesus died as much for the slaveholder as for the slave, for the oppressor as for the oppressed...
...As he did so, a strong, sweet-and-sour odor rose from his armpit, but Velasco was oblivious to it...
...JOHN GARVEY Commonweal: 136...
...These, then, are the pluses...
...his replies were mechanical, as though he were muttering memorized phrases...
...We should take our politics straight...
...My objection to the Moral Majority is not to the fact that its politics are right-wing and mine are not, but to its willingness to use the coercive instrumentality of government to force its points home...
...And how to tan leather...
...There are people who have died in the cause of revolution, believing that their deaths would free others...
...Kto kavo...
...Don't ever do it in the name of Jesus...
...We have built up these villages of God in Nueva Espaha...
...They don't trust your own searching or uncertainty, having forgotten their own or, worse, never having experienced such things...
...There are people who support~ the papacy and social change, and they worry about the manipulation of an anti-papal form of Catholicism which could be used as an arm of whatever government currently has power...
...Are all of the people who live here Christians...
...Must justified American displeasure with Soviet behavior be counterproductive to be convincing...
...I won't debate the point...
...Anyone eager to equate socialism and Christianity should have another look at Dostoevsky's chapter on the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov...
...Those who uncritically support such movements should look at the history of the Living Church in postIll t tion for the poor," which is seen as the vocation of the Catholic and other Christian churches in our time...
...It is, after all, for a good cause...
...Unlike the villagers, he was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat...
...On the one side were the lively, vibrant People, discovering the fresh truth of the Gospel and liberation, which was equated with socialism...
...consulate...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
