The spirit of Saint Louis
The spirit of Saint Louis Papal visits can be a bit like a Rorschach test. Everyone sees what they want to see. John Paul II's January visit to Mexico and to Saint Louis initially seemed routine,...
...In this case, the line between concealing an adulterous affair and obstructing justice seems inherently porous...
...Of course, Clinton is a piker, morally speaking, compared to Augusto Pinochet or Kurt Waldheim, both of whom the pope received when they were heads of state...
...Maybe in the grand scheme of things, it is not important at all...
...In any case, for Catholic and non-Catholic alike, there was amazement at the audacity and persistence of the pope's several direct appeals for mercy and a frisson of elation at a sign of compassion from the governor...
...Not President Clinton...
...The pope is right to be imperturbable...
...But the pope didn't seem to mind at all...
...Pollsters and pundits quickly pointed out that just as many of America's Catholics don't agree with the pope on abortion, they don't agree with his opposition to the death penalty either...
...Not House minority leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo...
...Clinton is guilty of far worse sins (and unimpeachable offenses) than covering up adultery—he has several times refused to sign a partial-birth abortion bill, and as governor of Arkansas, he presided over the execution of a retarded man during the 1992 presidential campaign...
...Thaf s a very Catholic attitude...
...Still, the pope and a good many Catholics, north and south, know that most of these issues are more important than the partisan, puritan, and prurient interests at work in the effort to impeach the president...
...Even so, it was more than a little galling for the president, who seems to have forgiven himself, to use the meeting with the pope as his own bully pulpit...
...During his visit, the pope said he prays for Mr...
...The pope knows, we all know, that it is not that important...
...Those Catholics, on the one hand, who are against abortion and those, on the other, who are against the death penalty had occasion once again to see the logic of the consistent ethic of life, first enunciated by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and implicitly given a papal benediction in word and gesture in Saint Louis...
...Not Catholics Henry Hyde or Tom Daschle, or any of those other important people in Washington...
...If he hadn't, who would...
...John Paul II's January visit to Mexico and to Saint Louis initially seemed routine, only scaled back from his previous trips to accommodate his failing health and halting steps...
...No one in the House or Senate would dream of impeaching him for these...
...Dare we point out that there are greater evils in the world than this...
...Carnahan is a Baptist, and not a Catholic...
...the 5 pope talked about some of them in Mexico City and in Saint Louis...
...There are, as we tried to point out a few editorials back ("Distracted Nation," January 15,1999), many more important problems in the world than Bill Clinton...
...Impeachment now listing to starboard in the Senate...
...Clinton is an adulterer, a liar, a subverter of the law, and seemingly not all that repentant...
...Ask and it shall be given to you...
...Some people, no doubt, were disappointed that the pope met with President Bill Clinton...
...Clinton ought to be near the top of that prayer list along with the crew of the U.S.S...
...He pleaded for mercy for a condemned killer scheduled to be executed on February 10...
...Thank goodness Mr...
...At a time when American public life is ruled by a mean-spirited vindictiveness, the pope and the governor showed how simple it can be to manifest a generous heart...
...We can't say that his argument in the post-synodal statement, Ecclesia in America, is always compelling or necessarily full proof...
...In a religion with serious moral standards, the distinctions between these and the obsession to find Mr...
...Clinton guilty are clear...
...In truth, Mr...
...The nation could use a few more such gestures...
...Clinton, but to beg for the life of a convicted murderer...
...If neoliberalism has triumphed in the Southern Hemisphere, it is, in part, because the pope and his Latin American episcopal appointees have dismantled a powerful, if problematic, analytic tool—liberation theology...
...Governor Mel Carnahan said he was moved by the pope's appeal and shortly after the papal plane departed, he commuted the sentence of a death row prisoner, Darrell Mease, to life imprisonment...
...In Saint Louis, amid many messages, perhaps too many, the pope made a gesture that caught everyone's attention...
...In Saint Louis he chose the better course, not to scold Mr...
...Independent counsel Kenneth Starr, both perpetrator and victim of this vindictive spirit, may need more than a few prayers, perhaps a thirty-day novena...
...Abortion is one, capital punishment another, grinding down the lives of the poor still another...
...Even so, it looked to be a teaching moment...
...The pope received America's number one public sinner without berating him or wagging his finger (a gesture the pope reserves for Catholics...
...In contrast, his mind and heart seemed in topnotch condition...
...Clinton and all American leaders—a benison the nation could hardly refuse, First Amendment complications notwithstanding...
...But back to the Rorschach test.What we liked was the pope's imperturbability in the face of the political meltdown in Washington over the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal...
Vol. 126 • February 1999 • No. 3
