As such structures grow stronger and spread farther, they become the source of other personal sins. They influence the behavior of increasing numbers of individuals, leading them in turn to violate God’s moral law and thus to commit sin.
The originators of those structures have, in other words, introduced into the everyday world of men and women influences and obstacles that last far beyond the actions and brief life span of any individual. The structures are the vehicles of their sins, and can aptly and accurately be described as “sinful structures.”
As he has traveled throughout the world, one of Pope John Paul’s main purposes from the start has been to establish a positive agreement with his peers in this matter of moral values. He has sought an understanding, however rudimentary, about a specifically human value that the secular pioneers among the nations would agree is distinct from all other values, whether those values are cultural, political, ideological, economic, financial, nationalistic or sectarian.
The context of these conversations, of course, is never a pie-in-the-sky exchange of religious or philosophical views. Whether in meeting with President Ronald Reagan in Miami in September 1988, or with Captain Blaise Campaoré, dictator of Burkina Faso, in the capital, Ouagadougou, in January 1990, or with President Hissen Habré of Chad on the following day in the capital, N’Djamena, or in any of the scores of other such encounters, the context is always the growing interdependence of modern nations.
From the outset of his pontificate, John Paul has found increasing awareness among his peers about what is happening in world affairs. Though some were as articulate in their practical judgment about those affairs as John Paul, all have demonstrated at least a growing intuition about the two primary forces that are reshaping the world in the final decade of the millennium. Everyone he has spoken to agrees with the Pope at some level that there is in the making nothing less than a world system, determining relationships between all the nations that constitute human society.
And predictably enough, all agree with him that this world system—this newly minted and all-encompassing interdependence that is coming into existence—includes economic, political, cultural and sectarian elements.
What was less predictable for many onlookers was the success John Paul has achieved in hammering home what he is certain is the most basic fact of all: the fact that interdependence among nations must be based upon some common agreement as to moral good and moral evil in modern life. And, further, that if such common agreement cannot be reached as a working basis of globalism, then all attempts at establishing a new world order will end only in disaster.
It is true, of course, that most of the Pope’s counterparts in the arena of developing global interdependence among nations do not talk about “moral values”—at least, not in those precise words. But almost anybody will talk about environmental pollution as a moral evil, and about an institution that causes pollution as a sinful structure. In the same way, there is general agreement, for instance, that to forestall and finally to prevent sub-Saharan famine would be a moral good or benefit to the whole community of nations.
Among both capitalist and Leninist internationalists, as well as in the nations pulled irresistibly along in their wake, John Paul has found many men and women of faith who do entertain some deeply rooted concept of moral good and moral evil in our lives. He has found many who recognize even that truly human life involves a moral value that they do identify as a demand of God’s will, and as the only valid foundation of an ethic that is absolutely binding on all individuals, themselves included. He has talked with many more who have no explicit faith, but who nonetheless admit that the obstacles to the development of nations rest on profound “attitudes” that human beings can “decide” to regard as absolute values.
The one thing John Paul has not found in his papal travels, in fact, is any disagreement with him about the need for a binding ethic that must obligate the whole society of nations. Christian believers and crypto-believers, nonreligious believers and positive atheists—even those who have a diehard antireligious attitude and policy—all are prepared to go that far with the Pontiff.
Many differ with him about the source of any such binding ethic, and about its details. But, by and large, John Paul has found most secular leaders profess a deep respect for the great spiritual values.
If not all of his secular peers place spiritual and moral achievement at the top of their daily agenda of things to do, they have nevertheless all agreed with the Pontiff that, in the concrete and practical actions between the nations, there is a human element—a human law—in all mankind’s activity that cannot be reduced to material necessity alone, or to any law of material forces.
Again, not every secular leader agrees with Pope John Paul that man was created by God for a divine destiny, and that moral primacy in human life and affairs is bound up in the matrix of eternity. Nevertheless, not one leader has expressed any doubt to John Paul that the spiritual value of man finds expression in religious and moral codes, which in turn have direct and profound effects on cultures and civilizations.
Above all, even the most cantankerous secular leaders do all agree with what everyone sees as John Paul’s inescapably practical and very this-worldly proposition: Unless that mysterious element innate to every man, woman and child on earth—that element which John Paul analyzes in the unrelenting terms of morality and immorality—is defined and accepted in the new world order as the very basis of its structures and its aims and its day-to-day activities, then whatever is built by way of geopolitical structure will only lead to greater human misery.
In that unrelenting moral analysis of Pope John Paul and his expert advisers, the globalist pioneers who are his peers in the world arena fall, broadly speaking, into four principal groups.
There are the so-called Wise Men of the West, together with their Internationalist and Transnationalist associates in the Western world. This group has the longest experience in developing a specific socioeconomic policy tied to an underlying political ideal. Then there are the oil-rich Arab nations. And there are the “Asian Tigers”—Japan, South Korea and Taiwan—to whom Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia are already acceding as peers. And finally there is the surprise late entry: the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev, together with the full panoply of its Eastern European empire; its surrogates abroad—today, mainly Cuba, Angola, Syria and Vietnam; and its loose hangers-on, such as the Ethiopia of Mengistu Haile Mariam, Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya, and Marxist Benin.
Because of Gorbachev’s remarkably sophisticated approach to the new geopolitical dimension of human affairs, and because of the Soviet leader’s position atop the only other geopolitical structure already built and functioning in the world, John Paul sees Gorbachev as unique among his peers in the world arena. But the Pope also understands that even Gorbachev has been constrained by concrete circumstances—mainly the grievous errors of his own predecessors and the ebullient economic-financial strength of the Internationalists and Transnationalists—to join in the current pre-geopolitical preparations.
In other words, neither Gorbachev nor his refurbished Leninist internationalism can escape what John Paul has identified as the hallmark condition of our age: our universally experienced interdependence. Gorbachev has had to enter that arena along with everybody else. At least as far as his spoken and written words go, he apparently wishes to become a peer. And, were he to disappear tomorrow from the supreme leadership of the Soviet Union, his own “opening up” of the USSR to the world—like the analogous “opening up” of John Paul’s Church—has already gone so far that, with him or without him, the fact of change is irreversible.
That Gorbachev himself agrees on this point was made clear in the summer of 1989. During his visit to Paris, he was asked on July 5 if his innovative course would survive should he “disappear from the scene.” Referring to himself in the third person after the manner of Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte and General de Gaulle, the General Secretary’s answe
r was categoric and confident: “My policies do not have to be tied to Gorbachev himself.”
So powerful is this global tide that even important nations, such as India, that have insisted on their “nonaligned” status either will coast with the smaller nations on the periphery of events or will ride on the backs of the dominant players, drawn irresistibly along in the contest for political, economic, financial and ideological dominance in the formation of the new world order.
Yet, as powerful as that tide is, the juncture at which the architects and builders of global development and interdependence find themselves is so critical that, whether they love him or hate him, they are all but forced to look closely at Pope John Paul’s moral analysis. They examine every detail of the Pontiff’s moral assessment of themselves as pioneers of human life as they expect it to be lived in the twenty-first century. They carefully inspect his moral assessment of the nations that are, without exception, being re-formed before our eyes.
They test his moral analysis of the new structures that bind us all ever more closely in a common fate. Above all, they find themselves agreeing with his principle that it is impossible to understand how to proceed from this point unless there is agreement as to how we all—as a society of nations—arrived at this point in the road. The lay of the land ahead has been determined by what the nations have effected in the land already traveled.
7
The Morality of Nations:
Rich Man, Poor Man …
If there were such a thing as a historical map of shame—a map colored with the terrible consequences of sinful structures of bygone days—great human atrocities inevitably produced by those structures would loom as the tallest, grimmest mountains dominating that map.
Nearest the United States in place but the most distant in time would be the pre-Columbian institutions of Latin America that regularly and by accepted law doomed tens of thousands yearly to brutal death. It is difficult for us even to imagine fifty thousand people garroted and eviscerated on the same day and in the same place. Institutionalized impoverishment of over eight million Irish during the worst centuries of English Penal Codes, Ottoman Turk attempts to liquidate all Armenians, Stalin’s cool disposing of fifteen million Ukrainians, Hitler’s dreadful “Final Solution” spelled out in numbers running to six million Jews, the Allied betrayal of some hundreds of thousands of Slavs back into Stalin’s hands and certain murder, the liquidation of the East Timorese by the central Indonesian government—this would be a partial list of such promontories and peaks of human horror on a historical map of shame.
If there were such a thing as a contemporary map of shame—a map of shame in our world now, as it is being prepared for its geopolitical debut at the end of the second millennium—that map would be dominated by whole new mountain ranges of institutionalized exploitation. It would be dominated by structures and by systems of structures that foster, connive at or simply allow the domination of eighty percent of the world’s population by the other twenty percent.
In short, that contemporary map of shame would be the graphic expression of the atrocity we have come to describe so blandly as the division of the world into North and South, which is to say, in plainer terms, the division of nations, and of populations within nations, into rich and poor. Such a map of shame might find some way to show us the homeless, the refugees and the stateless—the human throwaways of our new world—who increase in their millions year by year, region by region, nation by nation.
Such a map would surely show the enormity of the most active volcano in our midst, formed by the greater part of our human family, which can be said to go to bed hungry and wake up miserable, with no hope today, tomorrow, next year that the coagulated mass of their suffering will be diluted and reduced and finally eliminated.
It is just such a map of shame that Pope John Paul does hold up to the world in his moral assessment of the geopolitical arrangements that are setting up our future for us. In his private conversations with the architects of those arrangements, in his meetings with secular leaders, in his speeches delivered in the Vatican and around the world, in his speeches and encyclicals delivered to the faithful of his Church, Pope John Paul’s constant theme is the moral and human unacceptability of this appalling mountain chain of human suffering and injustice. And his constant warning is that those mountains will either be reduced by our willingness to change or, by the very weight of their own misery, come crashing down upon all our hopes as human beings, shattering all our selfish visions of the good life, and burying in their rubble whatever peace we might have thought to fashion in our single-minded rush to development.
On the modern map of world shame that is the subject of so much of John Paul’s attention, North and South do not figure as precise geographical terms. Instead, they are the global frontiers where wealth and poverty divide not only nations, but societies within nations. They are the frontiers by which most of humanity is systematically and deliberately separated from any share in the prosperity and enjoyment of life to which each of us has a basic moral claim.
Deliberately. That is the operative principle. For, in his assessment, John Paul leaves no doubt that in the North-South division of the world, the North countries—steeped for the most part by now in their preoccupation with the race to superdevelopment—are steeped as well in immoral complicity in the sinful structures that contribute to and perpetuate the sufferings in the South countries. He leaves no doubt in the mind of anyone he speaks to that the multiple structures based in the North countries—industrial, financial, monetary, fiscal, political—line the pockets of many in the North and a few in the South, while the suffering of millions is prolonged beyond endurance. By definition, those structures must be called sinful.
To the discomfort of more than a few, John Paul underlines two main characteristics of the North. The first is its advanced state of industrialization. The North countries have a head start of immense size in regional and global entrepreneurship, and a growing—almost monopolistic—participation in the recent advances of the technotronic era.
The second main characteristic of the North is financial domination. Domination in the worldwide flow, management and use of capital and of manufactured goods. This wealth provides the North, among many other things, with a capacity for extensive investment in the South countries, and a capacity to make financial loans to the South.
By contrast, John Paul defines the South in terms of a series of crippling conditions that he has seen firsthand and whose details fill hundreds of reports that reach him yearly. These are conditions that only deepen and widen the already enormous gap that separates the South from the North countries.
Illiteracy; no possibility of higher education; economic and social inability to join in building one’s nation; discrimination that cuts deep ravines along religious, social, political and financial lines; denial of the right to economic initiative; inadequate housing; helter-skelter urbanization by millions as a last resort for mere survival; widespread unemployment and underemployment. This is but a partial litany of those crippling conditions—a minisurvey of the vermin endemic to the South and eating away at its vitals.
That these same conditions are becoming a plague in some areas in the North countries—even though they are still limited and usually controllable—is something John Paul takes as a preliminary tap on the shoulder of the North countries, as part of Heaven’s early warning system to the North’s leaders and citizens alike that institutionalized moral evil travels ever so easily back to bite the hands that feed it.
It is as obvious to the Pontiff as it is to many others that, beset by such an array of crippling conditions, the South countries cannot lift themselves by their own bootstraps out of their continuing poverty. At the same time, however, it is just as obvious that in their present ways of working, the much vaunted international trade, financial and monetary systems of the North cannot mesh and harmonize adequately with the limited possibilities of the South. That pair of basic facts is hi
ghlighted in every facet of the relationship—if it can be called that—between North and South countries.
Take, for instance, the billions of dollars in so-called foreign aid, and the billions more in profligate loans that have already been poured by the developed North countries into Africa, Asia and Latin America.
What effect, the Pontiff has asked pointedly more than once, and in more than one way, can come from aid or from loans when there is lacking in the South any adequate infrastructure—physical, social, technological, educational—onto which the North’s cooperation can be grafted?
The overall answer to that critical question can be written by too many millions—if they can write at all—with one word: “tragedy.” But “dangerous” might not be a bad word to use either, when you glance at the total national debts among the South nations—or even if you look at some of the debts in Latin America alone.
By the end of 1988, the national debt of Brazil was $120.1 billion. The national debt of Mexico was $107.4 billion. Yet neither country has the gross national product or the sophisticated financial, industrial, economic and educational underpinnings that will keep it from being crushed by debts of that magnitude.
Or focus even briefly on the case of Bolivia and Argentina. Bolivia is one of the poorest of the poor countries of Latin America, while Argentina is one of the most developed and cosmopolitan countries in the region. But both are engulfed in the same deadly dilemma. A large chunk of Bolivia’s meager national income depends on its sale of natural gas to Argentina. Bolivia depends on that income just to pay its national debt. But Argentina, racked by its own debt and by hyperinflation, has stopped all payments to Bolivia. So Bolivia in its turn has to renegotiate repayment of its debts. Yet without a bridge loan, which will carry it still deeper into debt, it cannot enter into such negotiations.
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