As to other religious organizations—post-Christian revisionist groups, for example, such as Unitarians, Mormons, Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses—it would be unrealistic to speak of any of them in terms of georeligious or supranational capability. And it would be fanciful for secular leaders—not a fanciful lot—to call upon such groups to galvanize the world against armed international oppression such as Hitler represented; or to enter an East-West dispute as a credible and effective arbiter among nations.
Even such a cursory survey can leave no doubt that by 1958, as the nineteen-year reign of Pope Pius XII drew to its close, he passed on to his successors an organization recognized by his secular peers as unique in the world as a global, supranational, independent and borderless power of immense proportions.
Everywhere they might look, in fact, other wielders of power in the world arena could see the particulars of the georeligious power of the Holy See. It lay in the major Vatican Congregations, or ministries, through which the Pope governs the religious and moral life of his global community. It lay in the far-flung ecclesial network of 1,920 dioceses comprising 211,156 parishes; and in some 3,000 bishops and 483,488 priests who tend those dioceses and parishes.
The lifeblood of all these and more—of the Vatican Congregations and everything they administer—is the personal authority of the Roman Pontiff. His coat of arms—the Keys of Peter beneath the triple tiara—placed over door lintels, stamped on letterheads, carved in wall plaques, embedded in official seals, is but one ever-present and never-fading statement of the source of that personal power. The holder of those Keys authorizes a living network of representatives to speak directly for him. He dispatches his own on-the-spot spokesmen abroad to act for him in at least ninety countries.
Those spokesmen in particular are not, any one of them, members of any local hierarchy. Nor are they dependent on any other source but the Pope for funds, instruction, moral support or inspiration as they cover the world, taking in all nations and every culture and religion. These personal representatives of the Holy Father are the twentieth-century version of the net Peter was bid by Jesus “to cast out over the deep waters.”
Like any secular diplomatic corps, this personal papal network is divided into ranks of some complexity. In this case, the rankings go by such names as Apostolic Delegate, Nuncio, Pro-Nuncio, Internuncio, Chargé d'Affaires, Apostolic Delegate and Envoy, and so on through a diplomatic system as intricate and complete as the most sophisticated of its secular counterparts. Thus, each rank is designed to cover a particular type of mission. And each rank, each title and each mission functions as a working, living part of a global system of government and influence whose center is the Vatican and whose embodiment is the Pope himself in his international designation as the “Holy See.”
What focuses the attention of these papal representatives and guides their practical judgments is not the status of their locales as precise and individual entities. It is the status of those locales as members of the global community.
What captures the unwavering attention of the secular leaders of the world in this remarkable network of the Roman Catholic Church is precisely the fact that it places at the personal disposal of the Pope a supranational, supracontinental, supra-trade-bloc structure that is so built and oriented that if tomorrow or next week, by a sudden miracle, a one-world government were established, the Church would not have to undergo any essential structural change in order to retain its dominant position and to further its global aims.
The most important facts and details about the Roman Church from the point of view of any secular power holder, however, all come down to one point. There is a tacit agreement among the great international political and financial leaders that the very attributes that give the Holy See its georeligious power and capability provide it, as well, with everything essential for the same power and capability on the political plane. In secular eyes, the Roman Church stands alone in every practical sense—and not merely among religious and ethical structures and groups—as the first fully realized, fully practicing and totally independent geopolitical force in the current world arena. And the Pope, as the sole legitimate head of the Holy See's organizational institution and structures—as the only one who fixes the overall goal of that institution's efforts—is by definition the world's first fully fledged geopolitical leader.
Of course, the Catholic Church did not freeze in its institutional tracks when Pius XII left the scene. Immediately after his death, in fact, and long before Cardinal Malula's plaintive cry “Everything must change!” there began a series of pontificates for which there were no precedents in all the turbulent history of the Holy See. No one—friend or enemy—could have been prepared for the changes that came so suddenly with the election of Angelo Cardinal Roncalli as Pope John XXIII, in October of 1958. “Good Pope John,” as people sometimes liked to call him, became the first in a line of four popes to date who have taken up a new and hitherto unheard-of papal stance.
Overtly, and in so many words, John declared that in this age, in his moment as Holy Father, the Church had decided to open itself to the world in an unprecedented way, to engage in the affairs of men in a way that was never the Church's way for all its nineteen hundred years of history.
The first prime characteristic of the new papal stance as John XXIII presented it was summed up on one word: aggiornamento—an “updating,” in which the Church would “open its windows,” would open itself up to the world in a way for which there was no parallel in the reign of any of the 261 popes who had come before.
John, in fact, was quite explicit when he spoke to the bishops assembled in St. Peter's Basilica on October 11, 1962, at the opening of his Second Vatican Council. Formerly, he said, the Church enforced the doctrine of faith by means of sanctions and punitive methods for violations of the papacy's teaching. This was now changing, he went on. The Church had decided, as Mother of all men's souls, to rely on explanation and dialogue in order to exact obedience, along with understanding, from its children. Why this change? Because, John explained, once the Church explains to a man the error of his ways and the correct doctrine of faith for belief and moral practice, he will accept it.
John XXIII's fundamental error here was to believe in a sort of natural goodness in all men and women, a goodness of such a kind that it could and would prevent them from following the dictates of evil—the evil in themselves as a remnant of Original Sin, and the evil around them borne by “the world, the Devil and the flesh.” It was, on the Pontiff's part, a grave misunderstanding of a sacred Church dogma, and at the same time, a piece of naïveté that is hard to understand in a man of his wide pastoral experience.
But, in fact, by that decision, John had misleadingly renounced one chief function of the Holder of the Keys of authority given him as Peter's successor. Technically, it was—perhaps all unconsciously—an act of misfeasance in high office. Practically speaking, it provided for the antiChurch and the superforce just the opening they needed to overturn the authority of Peter. If only John had lived to see how that “natural goodness” reacted to Humanae Vitae, the encyclical letter of his successor, Paul VI, about the inherent sinfulness of contraceptive methods! If only he could have foreseen that two thirds of the Church's bishops would, by 1975, have taken his words as a cue to them that they could cease to be authoritative pastors, cease indeed to obey papal laws and observe papal wishes!
John XXIII's application of his new principle of Church government was just as counterproductive when it was applied to the difficult relationship between the Church and the Soviet Union.
The second major characteristic of this astounding change demonstrated in a practical way just how profound its implications were for international affairs in the geopolitical arena. For suddenly, after so many years of such mighty efforts to break the Holy See's uncompromising attitude toward Leninist Marxism, the Soviet Union was dumbfounded to find itself included within the scope of personal and official papal attention.<
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John XXIII engaged in a personal correspondence with Soviet Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev. He received Khrushchev's son-in-law, Izvestia editor Aleksei Adzhubei, in the Pope's private library. And—most stunning of all after more than forty years of muscular and untempered enmity—John made an agreement with Khrushchev: In the Second Vatican Council, which the Pope had announced as the very vehicle of his Church's new opening to the world, there would be no official condemnation by the Holy See of the Soviet Union, or of its Leninist Marxism.
If the world was dazed by Pope John's words and actions, it was not unwilling to capitalize on the “windows” he opened so trustingly, or to enter as many of the geopolitical structures as it found suddenly unlocked, or to contribute to the Church's “updating” in ways John had neither foreseen nor intended.
Such problems notwithstanding, each of the three popes who have succeeded John XXIII has ratified and carried on the new and radical papal stance he introduced.
John's immediate successor, Pope Paul VI, amplified both the policy of aggiornamento and the new attitude toward the Soviet bloc. Grandiosely, and perhaps too loosely, Paul announced that not only were the Church's windows open but the preoccupation of the Church now was “man in all his works and ambitions to build a secure home on this earth.”
As to the Leninist Marxism so freely exported by the Soviet Union, Pope Paul went so far as to inaugurate official protocol talks in view of eventual relations with the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe; and to throw his weight behind the Soviet opposition to the American cause in Vietnam.
Brief as the next pontificate was, Paul VI's successor, Pope John Paul I, had no time to indicate what policies he had in mind concerning the Soviet Union and its satellites. But he did find time to speak of the Church “walking with man through all the highways and byways of man's pilgrimage.” Clearly, he had no intention of closing those windows.
John Paul II is the fourth in this revolutionary line of popes that began barely twenty years to the month before his own election. Characteristically, he had understood everything that had come before. And he was frank about his own orientation in the selfsame direction.
John Paul's own rule of behavior concerning the opening of his Church to “man in all his works and ambitions to build a secure home on this earth” was the subject of his first encyclical letter, published at Easter 1979.
In a pointed rhetorical question, the new Pontiff asked, What ministry “has become my specific duty in this See … with my acceptance of my election as Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter”?
His answer was categoric. He would take up with new energy and purpose where the previous three popes had left off: “It falls to me not only to continue it [his predecessors' policy] but, in a certain sense, to take it up again at the same starting point…. I wish to express my love for the unique inheritance left to the Church by Popes John XXIII and Paul VI…. They represent a stage to which I wish to refer directly as a threshold from which I intend to continue.”
In that encyclical letter, John Paul was already more specific than his predecessors in speaking publicly of his papal intentions. And his words were those of a leader who could be expected to initiate still more changes in his papal dealings with the world. “We are in a new season of Advent,” the Pope observed, “a season of expectation…. We can rightly ask at this new stage: How should we continue? What should we do in order that this new advent of the Church, connected with the approaching end of the Second Millennium, bring us closer to Him whom Sacred Scripture calls “Everlasting Father”? This is the fundamental question that a new Pope must ask himself.”
Referring to his institution as “the Church that I, through John Paul I, have had entrusted to me almost immediately after him,” John Paul underlined his understanding of the new papal stance that had begun with John XXIII, and his understanding of what he called “the Church's consciousness” of “that most important point of the visible world that is man,” and the Church's “awareness of apostolates.” And then, in his turn, John Paul pledged that this new “Church consciousness must go with universal openness.”
John Paul having made himself clear on the subject of aggiornamento, there could be little doubt that he would regard the change of papal attitude toward the USSR as of capital importance—and one that was right up his apostolic alley. For it was, after all, a policy followed in essence by every Polish Churchman in order to assure not merely the survival of the Catholic institution in that land, but its living force in every sector of public and private life of the nation. He had no intention of letting the Eastern European policy inaugurated by John XXIII and pursued by Paul VI continue on in its sterility. That Ostpolitik was nothing more than a connivance with the dreadful status quo the Soviets had imposed. John Paul intended to behave as Polish Churchmen had reacted to Stalinism—actively, not connivingly.
In the light of what he said in that early encyclical, and in the light of his own background as priest and bishop in Poland, Pope John Paul's early meetings with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko need not have been so puzzling as they seemed to some. And the rumors that surfaced so quickly that the Pope would go to Poland need not have been so surprising. For both were signals not only that he intended to bypass the Ostpolitik of John XXIII and Paul VI, but that he had long since mastered the art of dealing with the rough men of the Kremlin.
Nothing of John Paul's early attitude, or his confidence, or the finesse of his understanding with respect to the Soviet Union, was altered by the advent—to use the Pope's own pointed word—of Mikhail Gorbachev on the Soviet and world scene. In April of 1989, following the news that Gorbachev planned a visit to Italy that fall, John Paul was asked by newsmen during his papal visit to Mauritania if he would receive the Soviet leader in the Vatican. The Pontiff showed no hesitation and no confrontational mentality. “I would meet him as a head of state,” John Paul answered, “as the head of a system, a large state.”
That John Paul meant to emphasize a political framework and a geopolitical purpose in any such meeting with Gorbachev became clear when a follow-up question speculated too boldly about a possible answering visit by the Pope to the USSR. “No!” John Paul was emphatic. “A Vatican meeting with Mr. Gorbachev should not be linked to a possible papal visit to the Soviet Union—that possibility is something else, because that is a Church matter.” It was one thing for the Pope to grant an audience, as head of Vatican State, to a visiting head of state. It was quite a different matter for the Pope to visit an officially godless state that actively persecuted all believers.
Nice distinctions made by John Paul to the press in far-off lands, distinctions between the georeligious and the geopolitical power of the papacy, were all very fine. But, in Rome and elsewhere, the comparison was quickly made—gleefully by some, glumly by others—between the attitude of John Paul II and that, to take but one possible example, of Pope Pius XI toward Adolf Hitler.
When the jackbooted German dictator visited his Italian ally, Benito Mussolini, in Rome in 1938, Pius XI didn't hesitate in his response; and he made no nice distinctions. He closed all Vatican buildings, right down to the last museum; and then he retired to his villa at Castel Gandolfo, outside the city, until the “Nordic pest,” to quote one man in the papal entourage, had left Rome and gone back to Germany.
But the differences between a Pius XI or a John XXIII, on the one hand, and a John Paul II, on the other, lay in their individual circumstances and in their papal policies. Pius XI's policy was “hands off.” John XXIII's and Paul VI's was “open hands.” Both were reactive—if not reactionary—policies. John Paul's policy, characteristically, was active, even aggressive in its own way. Neither Pius XI nor John XXIII was faced on a daily basis with organized enmity in his own household. John Paul has to live with the superforce he cannot dislodge from his Vatican, and he must reckon with the network of anti-Church partisans spread throughout the length and breadth of his Church Universal.
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p; With both superforce and anti-Church, he must reckon as with enemies of his Petrine Office. He is aware of their intent. He has experienced their strength. But, he knows—or thinks he knows—that his main battle and objective do not lie in that direction. Rather, he and his grand papal policy are oriented outward. He does not hold up those Keys of authority in order to quell that in-house opposition. There's no point to that, for they no longer believe in the divine authority of those Keys. They firmly believe in the power and prestige of a pope as one more secular head. And they desire that power and prestige for themselves and for the obscure Master they serve.
But in the face of the geopolitical world, John Paul relies on the authority symbolized by those scarlet Keys, the “Keys of this Blood.” Precisely because of his unique power and status as head of that georeligious and geopolitical colossus, the Roman Catholic Church, his analysis of his secular counterparts has to be weighed into the balance of an accurate judgment about this extraordinary Pope.
Two
The Lay of the Land
6
The Morality of Nations: Whatever Happened to Sinful Structures?
The competition into which Pope John Paul II has entered, and upon which he appears to have staked everything, was fired by two great booster engines of modern vintage, and largely of American invention, that have already lifted the entire world into a new orbit of human activity and values.
The first booster engine was the helter-skelter global rush to material development, a factor that never before operated among all the nations of the world simultaneously.
That first engine fired the second: a genuinely global entrepreneurship that, once ignited, has worked in steady tandem with the first to create the conditions that are propelling the world into a single geopolitical community.
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