The Pope's Preoccupations

...These prelates have no sympathy for the comunidades de base, the grass-roots Christian communities devised by the Latin American Church...

...John Paul, on the other hand, agrees with Baggio and Lopez Trujillo that such communities threaten to become "a parallel church," a divisive and potentially schismatic force...

...Leading Latin American bishops and theologians see them as the wave of the future—a return to the attitudes and forms of early Christianity...

...The next day, in a speech welcoming the Pope to Nicaragua, Comandante Tom?s Borge tried, with more candor than tact, to set John Paul straight on the root causes of violence and oppression in Central America...

...And in his present position as head of the Vatican, he deals every day with ambassadors and government leaders...

...The real threat to the church in Latin America rises elsewhere, though...

...But Cardenal and his fellow priests holding office in Nicaragua are in good standing with the Church under an agreement expressly approved by the Vatican...

...they have pledged to perform no priestly duties while serving their government...

...A similar chaotic growth of fundamentalist sects is taking place in Latin America, and for the same reason...

...Similarly, when the Pope called for political dialogue between the Salvadoran government and the insurgent popular forces, his appeal amounted to a sharp repudiation of the war being waged with the support of the United States...

...The consequences are even more adverse, for in this Hemisphere reactionary forces are using the sects to disrupt the newly found unity of the poor, a process dramatized by Guatemalan President Rios Montt's Church of the Word...

...John Paul's official advisers on Latin America, whose counsel he seems to heed, are hard-line anticommunists—Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, who heads the Vatican's Commission on Latin America, and Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, who chairs the Council of Latin American Bishops...

...The Pope's Preoccupations Pope John Paul IPs recent whirlwind visit to Central America had some positive aspects...

...He feels compelled to preserve the Papacy's prerogative to define and defend orthodoxy, even when this means rejecting the pathbreaking reforms of the Second Vatican Council...

...John Paul's anachronistic defense of the traditional church cannot prevent this cancer from spreading...

...The world's media recorded the snub— the Pope denied his ring to the kneeling priest and shook a stern finger at him instead—and interpreted it as an admonition to Cardenal and other members of the clergy to stay out of politics...

...The Pope's first Central American speech reflected the views of the conservative Cardinals...

...In Africa, the failure of the Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant, to adapt to indigenous culture Has resulted in a plethora of breakaway churches across that continent, each crudely attempting to achieve a soulsatisfying synthesis of Christian beliefs and African traditions...

...In doing so, he reminded the world of genocidal practices pursued by the dictatorships that have held sway since the C I A engineered a right-wing coup in 1954...

...There he was urged by bishops and theologians to authorize a radical reinterpretation of the Christian message—one that took account of indigenous mythologies that have not been filtered through a Western European metaphysical system...

...His experience is limited to Europe, and especially to the Polish Church, caught in a perpetually tense relationship with a communist government...

...But these affirmative initiatives on the Pope's part were severely undermined by other, contradictory actions which diluted the contribution John Paul may have made to the cause of peace with justice...

...Despite that written agreement, the Pope, like Cardinals Baggio and Lopez Trujillo, seems determined to force the priests out of the Nicaraguan government, ignoring a long and sometimes honorable tradition of clerical participation in political affairs...

...His deep ideological commitment is to an identification of the Christian message with "Western civilization," and it blinds him to the possibility of any change that is more than cosmetic adjustment...

...Gary MacEoin's books include "What Happened at Rome?, " an analysis of Vatican CouncilII, and "The Inner Elite," a sociological study of the College of Cardinals...

...And so he came to Central America not to listen, but to scold...

...The grassroots communities may be a threat to the existing institution of the Church, but they are also a challenge...

...The media immediately interpreted the reference to "collectivist systems" as intended for the Sandinista government of Nicaragua...

...They share the Reagan Administration's conviction that the status quo, however unjust, must be retained at any cost...

...His political backing of the Solidarity movement in its struggles against the Polish government is a matter of public record...

...The Pope came to Central America encumbered by theological and ideological preconceptions that impaired his ability to understand what is happening in the Church—or in society...

...If we want to understand John Paul's visit to Central America, we must put it in the perspective of his 1980 visit to Africa...

...They reject liberation theology, perceiving it—correctly—as a threat to institutional power structures...

...The Nicaraguans interpreted it that way, too, and took understandable offense at the implication that their hard-won revolution was no better than the "pure economic capitalism" of the exploitive Somoza dynasty they had toppled...

...Latin America is more Europeanized than Africa, at least in a superficial sense...

...In Guatemala, the Pope renewed the commitment of the Church to Indians who are defending their land, their rights, their customs and traditions...

...It was the Pope's turn to be offended, and he showed it by snubbing Ernesto Cardenal, the poet-priest who serves as minister of culture in the Sandinista government...

...But recent studies have confirmed that the religion actually practiced by the peoples of the region differs from the official formulations of the institutional church...

...But the Pope was incapable of such flexibility...

...As Church historian Francis X . Murphy observed in his recent book, The Papacy Today, John Paul is "the essence of a political pope...

...Solutions to the region's pressing problems must be found, he said in Costa Rica, "without resorting to violence or to collectivist systems that can prove to be no less oppressive to the dignity of man than pure economic capitalism...

...n fact, no one in the Church has been more deeply involved in politics than John Paul was in his career as Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow...

...One was his unscheduled stop at the tomb of the most prominent victim of El Salvador's right-wing terror, Archbishop Oscar Romero—a clear rebuke to the Salvadoran regime, which had carefully planned the Pope's itinerary to exclude any acknowledgment of this martyred defender of the poor...