Editorials
COMMONWEAL Selective conservatism Is it possible to take America's political conservatives seriously? Year in and year out they warn that freedom and democracy are threatened by expanding state...
...Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R.-Utah) and Representative Henry J. Hyde (R.-I1L), for example, are erstwhile conservative defenders of the Constitution against the Supreme Court's "law-making" tendencies...
...The Vatican owes a similar recompense to those burned by the Ambrosiano affair...
...Deo gratias...
...SPOONS & JUST DESERTS "When money is Counted in sixpences," wrote Simone Weil, "we have boredom in its pure, unadulterated state...
...What about the strong, silent types, the conservatives who have so many other pressing things to worry about, like the threats to freedom emanating from affirmative action or left-wing professors or Bishop McGann's mild moment of truth at the Casey obsequies...
...Bartley was speaking, in predictably dismissive tones, of the new interest in business ethics, symbolized by SEC Chairman John Shad's contribution of $30 million for an ethics program at Harvard...
...Vatican finances have become more open and accountable under the present pope, but more needs to be done...
...Their questions during the congressional hearings are aimed at excusing, not probing, the administration's conduct...
...A signed piece by one editor ran under the headline "Boland Laws May Be the Real 'Crime' ". And so as to leave nothing to chance, the Journal wielded the ultimate argument: "Which side are you on, boy...
...This is as sturdy a moral compass as anything Harvard is likely to find with John Shad's $30 million...
...In March, when a Vatican report to the world's dioceses and bishops' conferences was sent out requesting they increase their contributions to the Holy See to offset its accelerating operating costs (last year the Vatican debt jumped to a new high of $56 million), the report was kept top secret...
...from all the evidence, Bishop Thomas Murphy is a welcome and appropriate appointment for Seattle...
...Actually, one of the better comments on the Iran-contra-spiracy did appear—inadvertently —in the Wall Street Journal...
...Too bad those words weren't addressed to the White House...
...Year in and year out they warn that freedom and democracy are threatened by expanding state power...
...the TV cameras showed Owen smirking appreciatively...
...Yet even setting aside the more extreme dangers of unconstrained executive power, the fact remains that no set of strictly domestic programs has expanded the reach of government more and had greater domestic consequences in the last half century than the burden of war and defense preparations...
...but most of the bank's shareholders lost out...
...This is an outcome that vindicates Archbishop Hunthausen, responds to the concerns of the local church of Seattle, and respects the principles of subsidiarity and colle-giality...
...When Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, director of the Vatican bank (officially known as the Institute of Religious Works — IOR) was asked some years ago where the IOR invested its money, he replied with what seemed a tongue of wisdom: "Where it does best...
...As the kids say, don't hold your breath...
...Now, since the ultimate stakes of foreign policy these days are nothing less than global survival, almost anything can be justified in the name of national security...
...It is time for Peter to make a full accounting...
...National security was the explanation Richard Nixon offered David Frost to justify break-ins against opponents of his Vietnam policy...
...A coadjutor bishop with a strong pastoral record and nine years of experience in the region has been appointed to assist Hunthausen with right of successsion...
...But it owes more to the whole church, for whose funds — and good name — it is responsible...
...Rome responded...
...This was before the $1.3 billion collapse of Milan's Banco Ambrosiano in 1982, in which the Vatican was the largest shareholder...
...The American bishops acted effectively...
...They provide a sturdier moral —and constitutional—compass than anything to be found in the blatant rationalizations or discreet silences of the Journal and likeminded conservatives...
...It can happen not only to televangelists, but to the Vatican as well...
...For today, however, Catholics can take heart...
...In questioning Robert Owen, Hyde waxed scornful about "punctilious observance" of the Boland Amendment...
...more recently it has fingered the real culprit: Congress, guilty of "micro-managing" Nicaraguan policy...
...Both tacks have been taken by the Wall Street Journal, the nation's most widely read conservative organ and one that obviously prides itself on its intellectual firepower...
...This is Tolstoy's The Forged Coupon written in the international financial pages...
...While the Calvi death remains unresolved, the Italian government has recently accused Marcinkus and two other top IOR officials of being accessories to fraudulent bankruptcy in the Ambrosiano affair...
...Certainly there are conservatives who admirably meet that description, but the Iran-confraspiracy has once again demonstrated what a small minority they are...
...Perhaps it is not surprising that the National Review would operate at a similar level of principle...
...The East money, set aside for "the poor of Latin America" by the late Ms...
...Then, too, those who rejoice in the outcome in Seattle cannot easily forget the institutional powerlessness they experienced in the process...
...Senator Hatch, on the other hand, short-circuits the whole problem by rewriting the Constitution so that foreign policy is completely the preserve of the presidency...
...By definition," answered Nixon crisply...
...Half of conservatism's most voluble representatives are rushing headlong to justify the Reagan administration's calculated and contemptuous circumvention of congressional limits on America's proxy war in Central America...
...and the commission will continue to watch over the implementation of the settlement...
...Take that, you Commy-loving pinko...
...Moreover, when he visits Texas, the Dickensian tale of the $500 million Sarita East estate is sure to be heard...
...A case can be made for civil disobedience by government officials, but Hyde's hinted comparison raises speciousness to new levels...
...When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal," said Frost to make sure he understood...
...The same year, Banco Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London...
...There are aspects of the Seattle settlement that remain, well, 372: Commonweal unsettling...
...But they have shown no such scruples when it comes to a crusading anti-Communist White House...
...It was in the third paragraph of a commencement address by Journal editor Robert L. Bartley...
...Whether out of thoughtfulness or sheer attachment to old ways, conservatives resist the shortcuts that may make for convenient policy but chip away at the barriers to unchecked use of government power...
...Colombian government authorities are presently determining whether to charge the bank's director, Monsignor Abraham Gaita'n, with illegal use of private savings...
...The three are presently holed up in the Vatican, fugitives from at least Italian justice...
...While the chair of Peter may claim to be rock solid, it appears to be far from market wise, both with its money and that of others...
...The editors believe, with George Will, that President Reagan should just assert his constitutional right to run foreign policy unimpeded by what Will calls "pseudo-legal static in the system...
...HUNTHAUSEN RESTORED Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen's full authority to lead the church of Seattle has been restored...
...Not at the Journal...
...When, however, it is counted in the millions, we have something far more intoxicating, though presumably less pure...
...In a small-scale repetition of the Ambrosiano story, the Catholic church's Vocational Bank of Bogota, Colombia, collapsed last October in what has been called Colombia's worst church scandal of the century...
...A cry of distress was raised and heard...
...Does 'the law,' mean that the results of this election are now overturned in favor of the foreign policy of Claiborne Pell...
...None of this would have occurred without the exertions of tens of thousands of Catholics, priests and laity alike, who voiced the distress that was felt by millions more...
...The pope would be wise to do so before embarking for the U.S...
...How long shall we wait before the neoconservative promoters of democracy, as in "religion and democracy" and "democratic capitalism," pour their considerable energies into countering the administration's remarkable rejection of democratic restraints...
...The bank's depositors were left $11 million in the red...
...The Boland Amendment "was an obscure rider on an appropriations bill," so why is the '' Pecksniff set'' making all that fuss...
...Most of the other half are looking the other way...
...Hyde also raised the ghost of civil disobedience, hinting apparently that secret and illegitimate use of government power by presidential staff members is comparable to public infractions by private citizens of laws they deem unjust...
...Those quotation marks around "the law" reveal as much about the Journal's political mentality as anything else...
...the ad hoc resolution, so skillfully wrought by the American commission, is still far from constituting an institutional remedy to that powerlessness...
...Now is the time to straighten out all our accounts: from Bogota', to Rome, to the Rio Grande...
...According to Bartley, ethics isn't all that complicated: "If in your careers you find yourselves muttering code words on street corners to collect suitcases of cash, or if you find yourselves routing your trading income through secret accounts on some obscure island, you had better stop to think for a moment about the ethics of what you are doing...
...What a joke...
...Or rather, if taken literally, they beg dozens of questions that any honest pastor knows cannot be avoided...
...The day before the Tower Commission issued its report, the Journal sneered at "this tower of political babble...
...Ask yourselves why you're doing things you want to hide...
...The Imperial Presidency is alive and well, but now its defenders are not liberals of the big-government school but conservatives of that-government-is-best-which-governs-least-except-when-it's-fighting-Marxists school...
...In Bogota', the church has pledged it will sell major assets, including the headquarters of its bishops' conference, to meet the Vocation Bank's commitments...
...Seventy percent of the creditors eventually recovered their investment...
...East in 1961, remains locked in Texas, blocked in part by local church and Vatican maneuvers...
...In 1984, following the Ambrosiano collapse, the Vatican agreed to pay $250 million to the Milan bank's creditors, admitting that it recognized a "moral responsibility in the affair...
...That bank failure was the largest in Italian history...
...Both the commission's call for changes in the Seattle's archdiocese's "psychological and ecclesiological orientation" and the 1985 document from Cardinal Ratzinger which is still to guide those changes are a good deal less than self-explanatory...
...At the moment, the Journal's working theory of government seems to be rule-by-the-free-market buttressed by a CEO elected for a four-year term...
...Which is to say that anointing the 19 June 1987: 371 president a four-year dictator in the matter of foreign affairs is potentially to make him a four-year dictator in just about everything —a point that has been noted by even less perspicacious minds than those at the Wall Street Journal...
...Wouldn't it behoove conservatives worried about "statism" to heed the checks and balances the Constitution established in regard to foreign, no less than domestic, policy...
...Does Congress stand with Elliott Abrams or with Dear Comandante Danny Ortega...
...When fire spread from several buildings owned by Sir Thomas More in 1529 to a neighbor's bam, More instructed his wife to pay full restitution to the neighbor, even if it left his own family with "nothing more than a spoon...
...An injustice was repaired...
...Estimates are that his visit will cost $2 million a day, a fact deserving close attention...
...Perhaps at this time of Pentecost we would do well to turn our attention, and that of the church, to the second verse of the Veni, Sancte Spiritus: "Come, Thou Father of the poor, Thou source of all our store...
...this fall...
...Conservatives, they evidently like to think, stand up for principle...
...This is just and right...
...Congressman Hyde has played the demagogue, invoking the gulag, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Cambodia, etc., etc., to suggest, emotionally if not logically, that Communist oppression creates a kind of blank check on which American officials can write out whatever foreign policy they think best, regardless of Congress's views...
...The Sandinistas or the anti-Communists...
...There, it is enough that "the American people elected Ronald Reagan president, passing judgment on both his competence and his foreign-policy beliefs...
...COMMONWEAL Selective conservatism Is it possible to take America's political conservatives seriously...
...The resolution of this painful and scandalous episode was brought about by a commission of American bishops, Cardinals Ber-nardin and O'Connor and Archbishop John Quinn...
...So much for the apologists...
...During this time, the CEO is pretty much a dictator when it comes to foreign affairs (barring some assault on the free market, of course...
...Furthermore, a cloud of suspicion will linger over the Vatican unless there is a full airing of the Ambrosiano affair and a pinpointing of responsibility...
Vol. 114 • June 1987 • No. 12
