POPE JOHN'S CHALLENGE TO THE RIGHT

...Far from being guilty of naivete, the Pope may well have perceived that, at a moment when Moscow and Peking were barely on speaking terms, the time had come for Rome to talk to Moscow...

...it looks beyond, perhaps overlooks, the nearer world of immediates...

...one needed only think back to the role of such Catholics as Philip Murray in not only promoting the advance of unionism but as a participant in the liberal politics of his time...

...He warned that many dangerous characters, ranging from card-carrying subversives to "pacifists and unilateralists" will "zero in like vultures on this idealistic, devotional statement by a man whose arguments and rhetoric lend themselves to the cynical exploitation of those who are glad to take the help of the good Samaritan while thinking him a fool for extending it...

...Although his column in The Journal-American was entitled, "Pope Isn't Going Soft on Reds," his text acknowledged concern about the way many things had been put...

...Newspapers whose circulations were predominantly or heavily Catholic—such as the Hearst outlets in many cities—naturally welcomed this idea...

...But when these unhappy characters had recuperated sufficiently to approach their typewriters, the commentary took two sharply divergent forms...

...Kennedy's Presidential campaign that many major Catholic figures felt spiritually closer to Richard Nixon than to the Catholic candidate...

...On these matters the encyclical is so forthright and unequivocal that the poor American Rightist must be forgiven for believing that Pope John has employed Morris H. Rubin as, if one may be forgiven the expression, his unholy ghost...

...Pope John's Challenge To the Right by JAMES A. WECHSLER Tn many respects the ideological upheaval and anguish, the panic of fanatics, and the disordering of dogmas created by the encyclical of Pope John XXIII—"Pacem in Terris"— have not been rivaled since the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet pact in the summer of 1939...

...But it is a vision of ultimates...

...These are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and finally the social services...

...But now, as then, doctrinaire armies have been plunged into disarray and confusion, and nowhere is the turmoil more conspicuous than on the American Right...

...One also recalls the countless "labor priests" who played so large if often unheralded a part in combating industrial oligarchy and aiding the underdog labor efforts of their communities...

...It is only to say that what he has done for the United States is to remove from the area of undebatable, even unmentionable subjects the great issues of our time, to lift the stigma from such propositions as world government and to create the gravest moral questions for those who view atomic war as a tolerable (if unpleasant) way out of the world deadlock...

...He wrote: "Principles are set forth which, in their ultimate bearing, indeed commend themselves to 'all men of good will' for their truth and value...

...Their eventual responses were not notably more distinguished...

...It says war is unthinkable in a time of nuclear weapons, and that there can be no triumph of "justice" in new, far more devastating Hiroshimas...

...The vision of peace and unity possesses him...

...Buckley that he refused to engage in such crude chicanery, and he laid down the line for the more sophisticated...

...He is as much against it as were Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII, merely says so less bluntly than they did...

...It was unmistakably the cry of a "do-gooder"—the substitute epithet is "bleeding-heart"—who had plainly seen the doom to which the nuclear arms race was leading all of us, who had obviously succumbed to the insidious blandishments of welfare-state theorists, and who could accept no moral compromise with racism under such spurious banners as "states rights...

...In effect, Herberg amplified Buckley's anxieties, and addressed himself in tones of sterner, if still reverential, reproof to the Pope...

...He said that he had read the encyclical three times "with the care, deference, and docility it deserves" and yet he felt obliged to confess that "even upon a third reading, I am left with a strange and uncomfortable feeling...

...It says this truth must become self-evident to Communist man as well as Western man...

...What he had done was to spurn the call for holy war, to bless the quest for negotiated agreements, and to damn the reckless folly of such journals as The News which are continuously crying for bigger displays of American muscle...

...It took The New York Daily News nearly a week to voice any comment...

...It must be said for Mr...

...Cardinal Spellman and other conservative Church figures have done much to fortify that impression...

...but then, immediately, these principles are made to apply—in a simple, unre-fracted manner—to short-range problems of policy and program...

...and a generous vision it is...

...By the same token, the Pope's language left such journalistic dignitaries as the scholars of the Hearst press, William Buckley and his National Review, and countless other Right-wing journalists in approximately the position occupied by the editors of The Daily Worker (and the Volkischer Beobachter) when they received the shattering news that Moscow had signed its pact with Adolph Hitler...

...It is not my intention to proclaim the infallibility of the Pope's words...

...While the Communists tried to misread the encyclical for their own purposes, no serious commentator contended that the Pope had become a front-man for Moscow...

...Well, this is not a matter of infallibility," he said reflectively, "but it will certainly be studied by many Catholics—and it could change a hell of a lot of closed minds on many issues...

...Nor do I have any doubt that what he has done will alter the American climate...

...Buckley professes to view the oversight with charity, but it is clear that he would not consider the Pontiff a very good security risk if he were an applicant for work at the Atomic Energy Commission...

...Certainly there is a lesson for liberals, as well as many others, in the fact that this most urgent appeal to reason has come from what many liberals have long regarded as the seat of irrationality...

...In the first phase, however, there was a deafening silence...

...If it had been delivered by Senator Hubert Humphrey, it would have called forth the wrath of most of the American press as an exercise in "appeasement" and as a manifestation of tolerance for the widest forms of political heresy...

...The heart of the encyclical, of course, is that it says to man what few of his leaders possess the courage to say—that there must be a great new beginning in human affairs, or there may be a sudden, apocalyptic ending...

...It depicts a world order that goes far beyond the present dimensions of the United Nations...

...In a labored editorial exercise entitled "What the Pope Didn't Say," The News offered the assurance that "His Holiness in no way has softened his opposition to Communism...

...It was an open secret during Mr...

...rupted by what is darkly called "the Church issue...

...One has no way of knowing the degree to which the message will reach the Communist world, and whether the commissars will simply seek to distort it into a white paper justifying their own aggressive type of "coexistence...

...It challenges all the sacred doctrines of the American Right...

...And he probably never met a payroll...

...Certainly those risks are real...

...The observation, of course, adroitly missed the point...

...One also remembers that unlike The Tablet, many a Catholic publication has refused to embrace McCarthyism and Birchism, and that the National Catholic Welfare Conference, official instrument of the American bishops, has warned of excesses on the far Right as well as on the far Left...

...Indeed, in many cities Democrats have been sadly conceding that the liberal-labor coalition of the New Deal era had been fatally disJAMES A. WECHSLER, editor of the editorial page of The New York Post, is the author of five books: "Revolt on the Campus," "War Propaganda and the United States," "Labor Baron," "The Age of Suspicion," and "Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor...

...Even Senator Joseph McCarthy managed artfully to prolong his political life by equating attacks on his political know-nothing-ism with anti-Catholic bias...

...After speaking at a Jesuit college the other night, I asked one of the priests how he thought the encyclical would affect the pattern of Catholic thought here...

...It has been equally apparent that the most frenzied Rightists of the John Birch variety regarded the Catholic Church as a primary recruiting-ground, and extremist diocesan organs—such as The Tablet of Brooklyn—seemed to vindicate the premise...

...The Daily News, presumably operating in the belief that few of its readers had pondered the text of the encyclical as published in The New York Times, simply proclaimed that the Pope did not really say what some unfortunate headlines had suggested that he said...

...The record indicates that Buckley's diagnosis did not fully satisfy The National Review diehards, or himself, and, in a subsequent issue, the problem was transferred to Will Herberg, a Right-leaning writer on theology, who wrote under the unprovocative title: "The New Encyclical: A Question of Perspective...

...But there is also the fact— wisely hinted at in the encyclical— that these are moments of ferment and discord within even the most rigid Communist societies...

...And then, from the Vatican last month, emerged a manifesto far more "radical" in substance and spirit than almost any oration even our most fiery liberal politicos would dare to deliver...

...There were always major flaws in this simple-minded picture...

...the Hearst's New York outlet, The Journal-American, entrusted the major task of analysis to Buckley, who now doubles as a Hearst columnist...

...Therefore a human being also has the right to security in cases of sickness, inability to work, widowhood, old age, unemployment, or in any other case in which he is deprived of the means of subsistence through no fault of his own...

...Their political conservatism was given a certain lofty, useful sanction by their presumed identification with the Church...

...A similar approach was followed by The Tablet...

...For too many years there has been a general—if often inaccurate—assumption in U. S. politics (and in other places) that the Catholic Church represented a massive battalion committed to the service of Right-wing politicians...

...The lesson, which I think the encyclical tried above all to state, is that we live in a desperately explosive world in which nothing can be saved by the repetition of stale slogans and old war cries...

...What Herberg seems to be saying is that the Pope has made the fatal youthful mistake of confusing heaven with earth...

...It addresses this basic wisdom to the true believer and heathen alike...

...He stands plainly exposed as a dreamer, a Utopian, an idealist who has blunderingly tried to meddle with the practical business of modern men, and who has hopelessly mixed up some vision of the future with the realities of the present...

...Yet the overall sense grew in the age of "affluence" that, even though a Catholic might be elected President running on a liberal Democratic platform, some of the spokesmen for his Church were basically at odds with him—both in- domestic and foreign policy—and that American Catholics were steadily drifting toward right-wing Republicanism...

...But we, on our part, must live in both...

...His indictment, though longer and more detailed, affirmed Buckley's portrait of a guileless innocent floundering in a world he never made...

...It pleads for a proposition neither more new nor less revolutionary than that of human brotherhood—an end to the subjugation and oppression of man by man...

...Pope John is a man of great simplicity of spirit, a man of the deepest Christian idealism...

...In short, Buckley depicted Pope John as a sort of well-intentioned muddle-head who sought to appeal to those "finer instincts in a man which aspire for peace" but who forgets that "the leaders of the world are not all right-thinking men...

...It calls for government intervention to aid the helpless and the poor, in language that ought to be read by all those church-goers of every faith who still resist minimal social reforms: "Every man has the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means which are necessary and suitable for proper development of life...

...He sees himself, if we may presume to guess, as the Pope of Peace and Unity...

...One hastens to say that the impact of the encyclical offers a brighter prospect for mankind than did the document which shook the world twenty-four years ago...