NO HOLIER THAN THOU
Mayer, Milton
No Holier than Thou by MILTON MAYER It is time to blow the whistle on His Holiness and have another go at breaking his stranglehold on Christ. It was the high priest who turned the Pacifist over...
...Declaration of Human Rights praised and prayed for...
...Muscle corrupts, and when he had absolute power he was absolutely corrupt...
...You see, by the time you get to be a Prince, of the Church,, or the State, or the Elks Club, you are fit to be a Prince...
...Such princes are we all, some of us two-spots in Pocatel-lo and some of us face-cards in Geneva or Rome...
...But what (you say) of John XXIII...
...Pacifism is a negative quality that contents itself with words and makes no contribution to the construction of the world that is essential to true peace," Maurice Cardinal Roy, President of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, said by way of helping Monsignor Poupard explain what His Holiness really meant...
...Or with racism (There shall be neither Greek nor Jew) or with capitalism (What mean ye that ye grind the faces of the poor) or with nationalism (One body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one Shepherd, one flock) or with disobedience of unholy law: We should obey God rather than men...
...The President would not have to fly around the world to exchange Pius platitudes with a high priest...
...and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace . . . the shield of faith . . . the helmet of salvation . . . and the sword of the Spirit...
...it does not mask a base and slothful way of life, but it proclaims"—here we go again—-"the highest and most universal values of life: truth, justice, freedom, and love...
...You don't see us upsetting the tables in the temple...
...In his Christmas Message his Holiness called upon the faithful (and the faithless...
...Yea, when ye raise your hands in prayer, I will not hear...
...They weave their webs of loopholes and then slip their Secretaries of State and Presidents of Commissions into the appropriate loophole as the occasion requires, to explain that His Holiness or His Excellence or His Majesty is a Man of Peace...
...But what is and what isn't conscience is, of course, determined by the President, with whose determination the Pope does not presume to interfere...
...Were their World Council a world council like his, would they, when they say, "War is contrary to the will of God," themselves undertake then and there to do the will of God and say, "Hell, no, we won't go...
...We cannot manipulate encephalitis and yellow fever into person-to-person transmission and have other men trust us...
...Crucify him...
...Or with Jesus Christ: He that be-lieveth on me, the things that I do he will do likewise...
...Ye shall walk in his path, and he will show you his way...
...The phony public authority that has no authority against unilateral sovereign aggression and despotism: "The public authority of the world community is not intended to limit the sphere of action of the public authority of the individual political community, much less take its place...
...for your hands are full of blood...
...And for their sake the city may be spared, the careless city, that saith, There is none like me...
...See (you say) how even the agnostics and the atheists love him...
...A good man, John XXIII...
...So they're upset by the bloody Communist atheist, the "Assyrian" of old: And the staff in his hand is the rod of mine indignation...
...But he didn't have to...
...Ah, my child...
...So you repudiate the Church tradition of the just war, Your Holiness— or does 'hardly possible' mean a little tiny bit possible...
...He is still doing it, "fornicating" (you should pardon the expression, but it's Dante's) "with kings...
...That's the Establishment, and do you know what happened to the hippie who called himself Jeremiah and said, "In righteousness shalt thou be established...
...One of the best to have jingled the Keys of Peter...
...Ah, my child...
...He got an incitement to riot against the pacifists: "The world," said His Holiness, "must be educated to . . . defend [peace] . . . against the snares of tactical pacifism, intended to drug the enemy [Give way to wrath] one must overcome, [Overcome evil with good.} to smother in men's minds the meaning of justice, of duty and of sacrifice...
...the accumulation of hate and ruin, not the reconciliation of the contending parties...
...Ah, my child...
...They say, and do not...
...As to dissemination, he who runs may read the record of total failure in the success of a contrary faith, capitalist and Communist materialism, in overcoming the world...
...We cannot have the Pentagon owning fifty-three percent of all Federal property and have civilian control of government and diplomacy...
...The Post-Dispatch spake alone: Pope Paul VI has suggested that pacifists are cowards, and the most charitable thing that can be said of his remark is that it is egregious-ly uncharitable . . . His gratuitous comment implies that there is some litmus paper test by which a man can determine when his country is defending justice and liberty, and if his country passes the test he is a coward if he is not willing to wage war . . . Would the Pope venture to say which side is defending liberty and justice in Vietnam...
...The Black Popes of Protestantism are porkchop-pers, too...
...All the wars go on, and the watchword in Rome, Geneva, Mecca, and Tel Aviv is still Pax, the Pax Romana of which the ancient historian said, "They make a desert and they call it peace...
...And so, no Pax...
...Maybe even a little worse, because we deceive only ourselves, while they come "in my name, saying, 'I am Christ,' and deceive many...
...Pope Pius XII, Allocution on the Feast of the Pentecost, June 13, 1943...
...They put their presence—Christ's Presence—on the line where the heads are split and split no more hairs about the Nature of the Presence...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, the newspapers spread the attack on pacifism across the page and (so far as I have been able to discover) spake not a mumbling word of editorial protest...
...We can't have it both ways...
...It was the high priest who turned the Pacifist over to the secular arm for trial...
...We cannot propagandize for peace while our deeds give the lie to our words...
...As Popes go—as Boniface goes, as Luther goes—a most excellent, a most noble man...
...Who rejected the "defense" (by human slaughter) "of justice and liberty," who "fled from his responsibility" to kill, from the "great duties" to the Roman Proconsul, from the "generous exploit" of passing the cup of death to another and drinking it himself instead...
...This mealy-mouthing of Peace isn't meal at all, but meat...
...the kindling of passions, not their pacification...
...Base and slothful and worse: "It is to be hoped that the exaltation of the ideal of peace may not favor the cowardice of those who fear it may be their duty to give their life for the service of their own country and of their own brothers, when these are engaged in the defense of justice and liberty, and who seek only a flight from their responsibility, from the risks that are necessarily involved in the accomplishment of great duties and generous exploits...
...And the admission of China, Your Holiness...
...Christ was, and is, the Commanding Officer of Pacifism...
...but never yet as long as Presidents kept coming to him for his blessing...
...Pacifism may be unrealistic, but it is not cowardice...
...And the war goes on...
...It is as nice, "in its time," as Leo's Rerum Novarum was in its...
...They are tut-tutted and hooted and transferred and rebuked for their little Encyclicals...
...Would they be different, Geneva from Rome, if they had Rome...
...Not a word on universal conscription, the most blasphemous of all sins against the doctrinal person of man...
...He was never asked to bear arms, and he never refused to...
...Monsignor Poupard, the Vatican Secretary of State, had to explain that His Holiness did not include in his anathema those who "for reasons of conscience refuse to bear arms...
...The rest of the aspirants for the kingdom of this world in 1968 will all pile into Rome behind the President, for the Vatican, like the Legion Convention, is one of the bases the 1968 aspirants can touch without being tagged out...
...I.e., the path to peace is war...
...Or with peace: . . . but by my spirit...
...Not a word on civil disobedience, except St...
...Could Christ the Pacifist ask for anything less—the Pacifist who repudiated "his own country and his own brothers," yes, and his mother and father, to die for every country and for every man his brother...
...My child, if the servants of God are sinful, how should the servant of the servants of God be holy...
...Not a word on miscegenation, the only answer to unchristian racism...
...the Holy hogwash that cascades from the balcony, and thence from the pulpit, at Christmas is the despair of the faithful...
...MILTON MAYER is a staff member of the English department at the University of Massachusetts...
...They are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge...
...You have been measured, and measured, and measured again on the way up and never found wanting...
...Marx the bloody atheist said it straight before Leo (described by the encyclopaedia as "opponent of socialism and Communism"), and Lenin the still bloodier atheist before John...
...Faithful fulfillment of obligations assumed: Is it His Holiness John or His Unholiness Rusk who is saying it...
...Or with themselves: And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men after me...
...The Episcopalian rector of Williamsburg got it in the neck for talking about this war now and this peace now when the President went to church in (for the first time in his life) the misplaced confidence that he'd hear about War and Peace in general...
...He got it from His Holiness without asking...
...The infallible Popes, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Druid, have fornicated and failed, and their failure is a sign that no man can serve two masters or, as Father Berrigan says, "We can't have it both ways...
...War...
...And the Presidents sing the Amen chorus, for the Presidents are Men of Peace, too...
...But the United Nations praised and prayed for and "the public authority of the world community" invoked...
...He may be even less holy than thou, not because he is supposed to be more holy but because he still has some power or (as they say these days) muscle...
...But the U.N...
...The New York Times had its little helpers in the press generally...
...It is the poisoned meat—it, not atheism—on which apostasy battens...
...There's a low one close by, in Baltimore...
...The Rome correspondent of The New York Times explained that "the Pontiff's references to the need for"—here we go again—"justice, balance, and independence as ingredients for true peace, once again, as in many previous declarations, marked his distance from those who argue that the path to peace in Vietnam, for example, is by way of an unconditional United States withdrawal...
...He was never called upon to perform what the Monsignor calls military service—the service of killing a man on pain of being killed by your commanding officer...
...His Holiness is no holier than thou —and thou knowest in thy secret heart how holy that is...
...the contrary...
...But His Holiness had a little somejr thing special for them in the Christmas bag this year...
...The artful dodgers of Rome, Geneva, Washington, and Moscow never come right out with it...
...So the base and slothful Pacifist—who called upon men to emulate the ravens who sow not and reap not—is anathematized...
...The business of His Holiness is to defend and disseminate the faith...
...A persecuted Prince, stripped of his Principality, a Niemoeller or a Faul-haber, has been known to be established in righteousness...
...Violence has always achieved only destruction, not construction...
...My friends, have you read Pacem in Terris, or just "read in it," or just celebrated it...
...They told him, "Prophesy smooth things...
...We cannot fight the abstraction of Communism by killing the men who believe in it...
...The only thing wrong with it is that its time is past before it is signed and sealed...
...The wars go on and on, because the porkchoppers of Rome and Geneva will lift a hand, two hands, in prayer but never a finger to stop them...
...Pacem in Terris...
...Ah, my child...
...They don't talk about Peace with a capital P, or War with a capital W. They talk about this war now and this peace now...
...We cannot bomb North Vietnam and support U Thant's program for peace...
...And the shepherds shall have no way to flee, nor the principal of the flock to escape...
...Christ was not a conscientious objector...
...And who, Your Holiness, decides whether conscription is an unjust law...
...In fact it comes a good deal closer to the virtue of Christian love than the kind of military nationalism the pontiff's remark tends to endorse...
...War is dreadful, simply dreadful, and "it is hardly possible to imagine that in the atomic era war could be used as an instrument of justice...
...We are all Men of Peace, who would not make war except as a last resort...
...War is simply dreadful, and men and governments should "give serious thought to the problem of peaceful adjustment . . . founded on mutual trust, on sincerity of negotiations, on faithful fulfillment of obligations assumed...
...Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of the Lord, your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness...
...Not a mumbling word...
...Like him, they won't level with war: Not by might, nor by power...
...But Holiness...
...Of course he no longer fornicates with actual kings, his claim to temporal power ("the gift of Constantine") having been exposed as forgery's finest hour...
...We are the temple, and we don't want things upset...
...What he does nowadays, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Jew, is confer with Presidents and deliver Messages (with a capital M) on Peace (with a capital P...
...that's a base His Holiness has to touch these days) to celebrate a "Day of Peace...
...Out in the non-universal boondocks, far from Rome and Geneva, there are Non-universal Pastors, priests, and monks, and nuns, and rabbis, and ministers, and seminarians who lift a finger...
...Could the President ask for anything more...
...And America's and Russia's refusal to sign it, Your Holiness...
...Prophesy sweet deceits," and when he didn't they put the cuffs on him...
...Peace," His Holiness explained, "is not pacifism...
...Not a word about the Honorable Profession of Arms, of which the word of God says: ". . . We wrestle not against flesh and blood...
...With the usual honorable exception of the St...
...Cardinal Roy and Monsignor Poupard had their little helpers, too, in explaining what His Holiness really meant...
...Crucify him...
...Thomas' homily that an unjust law does not bind in conscience...
...He contented himself with words...
...He is currently on leave in Europe, where he is writing a book...
...their kingdoms, too, of this world, though theirs are a mule and forty acres compared with the White Pope's and they cannot call themselves, as he does, the Universal Pastor...
...He has failed to defend it...
...This is the Flesh made Word, and there are no two ways of reading it, and the White and Black Popes are Sunday humbugs like the rest of us...
...Or buried in The Catholic Worker, where Father Philip Ber-rigan, S.S.J., of Baltimore, has an audience of hundreds, instead of hundreds of millions, for his: "We [Americans] cannot ravage the ecology of Vietnam and kill ten civilians for every soldier and expect to have anything but do or die opposition...
...And Christ the Pacifist said it straight before all of them...
...The distinction, said the Monsignor, had to be drawn between conscientious objection "and mere pacifism and cowardly evasion of military service...
...He could...
...The phrase tends to endorse is accurate...
...This was the anathematization of Christ the Pacifist...
...But Father Berrigan would let him have it, while Papa Sancto, or Papa Diplomati-co, the Universal Pastor who has to keep his Universal Fences mended, will deliver another Message...
...As long as the Day of Peace was to be confined to celebration, commemoration, inspiration, exhortation, exaltation, and prayer, and as long as we were to "beseech Christ who was immolated for us to 'grant us peace!' "—the aspirants of 1968 could all touch base...
...He ordered his Christians not to fight and told them that whoever drew the sword would perish by it...
...On sqcial justice the secular reformers have already said it and said it straight and scandalized the world...
...And one of these days, no Terra: Thou shalt be visited with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire...
...But Christ overcame the world by being born, and went with the Devil to the mountain top to be offered the kingdoms of this world so that those who came after him would know what to do and never abandon Christ for the crusaders and the Baptist for the bomber and the Kingdom for the kingdoms...
...Could the President ask for anything more than war as the path to peace...
...And does 'atomic era' mean that a total war fought like World War II in Europe, or like Korea, the Congo, Algeria, Vietnam, may still be a just one...
Vol. 32 • February 1968 • No. 2
