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Pope’s role in Poland and Latin America

By

KATI MARTON

in.“ The Guardian,” London

The night the military assumed control of his country, it did not take long for the Pope to acknowledge the crowd’s relentless chanting — “Papa, Papa,” — in St Peter’s. Square beneath his fifth floor Vatican apartment. John Paul II appeared at his window and spoke for just two minutes on that bitter cold Roman night. He managed to-use the word “solidarity” six times. ’ It was only the beginning of John Paul’s vigorous identification with Poland’s time ■of crisis. Later he dispatched his own envoys to Warsaw, bearing messages • for General Wojciech Jaruzelski. The Pope was among the first of the world leaders to be consulted by President Reagan as the grip of martial law tightened. Nor did the Vatican bother to portray the recent visit to Rome of the Polish Cardinal Joseph Glemp as anything other than what it,was: a highlevel strategy session between two of Poland’s Church leaders profoundly engrossed in their country’s political troubles.

The concern the Pontiff has lavished on Poland has not, however, been equally in evidence on behalf of other, tormented regions, in the world. Some critical Catholics are now asking if John Paul is prepared to be Pope to all of his flock, or just to some. For the kind of political combativeness the Pope has displayed in support of Solidarity — nursing it into life through its embryonic stages and then battling to keep it alive — is just the sort of behaviour that he will not tolerate from members of his own church in that other strife-weary zone, Central America.

It is in that part of the world that the Roman Catholic Church’s most fiercely independent order, the Society of Jesus, has in recent times been energetically putting into practice the goal that it set for itself during- the 1975 World

Jesuit-Congress — “to promote social justice and take an option of solidarity with the poor.” The- Pope is not as comfortable with this solidarity as he is: with the union bearing'the same name. Jesuit priests — as well as those from other orders — have been openly siding with the poor in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Inevitably they have made themselves the natural enemies of the oligarchic Governments of the region. They have established themselves as adversaries of the entrenched capitalism : in Latin America that is often unchecked by either free trade unions or a vigorous parliamentary system. . Some see a notable resemblance between these regimes and the one which oppresses the Pope’s own homeland. The Jesuits in Central America have been ministering to those fighting for a different kind of society and, while putting up prefabricated houses, organising classes for the- illiterate peasant population and distributing food to the refugees from the ravages of civil war, they have helped to transform the Church’s cen-turies-old image as the natural bed-fellow of the colonial powers. Their reward for often acting as the peoples’ last resort has been an unprecedented Papal disciplining. Last northern autumn, John Paul II put his own man at the head of the Jesuits, repudiating the Society of Jesus’s method of democratically electing their leaders. The Pope appointed a nearly blind 80-year- old Italian Jesuit, Fr Paolo Dezza — long regarded as the Vatican’s man inside the Order — to be the 1 Pope’s “personal delegate” to lead the Society. The appointment came while the Jesuits’ elected Vicar-Gen-eral, the Basque Pedro Arrupe, was recovering from a stroke

that left him speechless and paralysed. The Pope’s decision to take control of the powerful order had been sealed two years earlier in Latin America. During his trip to attend the Conference of Latin American Bishops in. Puebla the Pope concluded that the region was too explosive, and the Church’s stake in its future too great, to allow the Jesuits to maintain their high political profile. John Paul’s deep-rooted personal antipathy to Leftist causes of all stripes, reinforced by the conservative views of his inner circle, made the Jesuit “punishment” almost inevitable. In Latin America itself, the conservative chairman of the permanent organisation of Latin American Bishops, Archbishop Lopez Trujillo of Colombia had for some time been putting pressure on' the Vatican to curb Jesuit■ activism. ’

The Church in El Salvador has been one of the sharpest thorns in Archbishop Lopez Trujillo’s side. The Church there has fought an uphill battle to temper the forces of inhumanity. And since 1977, 13 Catholic priests and nuns have been murdered. Seven were killed in the last two years. Churches and religious centres have been regularly bombed and machine-gunned. The extreme Right is behind this wave of violance and the security forces have, made little effort to curb the bloodshed.

One man became the symbol of resistance to El Salvador’s oligarchic Right - Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador. The Jesuits became Archbishop Romero’s major support in his growing involvement with the poor and the powerless. But he was not well regarded by the Vatican. He was known to have had problems with the Papal Nuncio. In 1977 the Nuncio was seen toasting El Salvador’s newly elected military president, Yet during his election campaign, the general had boasted that if he were elected

there would be no Jesuits left in the country. When the „ Pope came to Puebla in 1979, it was clear who had the Vatican's support. It was not Archbishop Romero and the Jesuits, but Archbishop Lopez Trujillo and the conservative bishops of Latin America.

Lopez Trujillo helped to draft the Pope’s principal address to the conference. He and his faction were seeking some kind of continuing accommodation with the Right-wing regimes in the region. And they succeeded in winning as their ally the Church’s most powerful figure.

The Colombian archbishop has the best possible connections inside the Vatican. He and Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, the head of the Congregation for Bishops, have almost identical views about the Jesuits. Both regard them as too soft on Marxism. Cardinal Baggio (known in Rome as Viaggio Baggio or Travelling Baggio) is among the Pope’s small handful of personally close advisers — and was reportedly instrumental in his elevation to the Papacy. As the head of the Commission for Latin America, Cardinal Baggio has long vewed the growing activism of the Jesuits — and Arrupe’s toleration of it — with dismay. Both Cardinal Baggio and Archbishop Lopez Trujillo are supporters of Opus Dei, the secret and controversial Catholic lay organisation. Opus Dei members provided many of General Franco’s advisers, and are generally known to be on the side of conservative and Right-wing '; Governments around the world. Another member of the Pope’s inner circle, Cardinal Silvio ; Oddi (who was appointed by. John Paul to head the Congregation of. Priests) is also an Opus Dei sympathiser. So too is Archibishop Martinez Somalo of Spain, the Vatican’s undersecretary of state. On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Romero of El Salvador

was assassinated.- No high level Papal envoy was in attendance at his funeral, which hundreds of the poor attended at some risk. “Was Archbishop Romero’s death of less importance to the. Church than Cardinal Wyszinski’s?” said an American Jesuit who attended the Polish Church leader’s funeral. “And why not invite the Lech Walesa of El Salvador to the Vatican? Is he worth less than the Polish union leader?” In fact, if Walesa has a Central American counterpart, his chances of survival in El Salvador are’ not. high. But some critics feel that the Pope is increasingly the full-time Archbishop of Krakow — and only part-time Pontiff to the rest of the world. Arcbishop Romero was gone but the problem of the Jesuits remained. In the eyes of some conservative churchmen, the Vicar-General of the Society was too slow to move against his maverick priests. In his first major ecclesiastical decision since the attempt on his life, John Paul II assumed direct control of the Society. The Jesuits have been reduced to a demoralised, dispirited

Order. “We are now ruled by a man who cannot speak, another who cannot see, and a third who cannot hear.” That is how one Jesuit sums up his view of Fathers Arrupe and Dezza and the Pope. There is a deeper question raised by the Pope’s humbling of the Jesuits. Their “crime” has been to undertake too conspicuous a role in the politics of a region whose complexity, many feel, eludes the Pope. The bugbear of marxism stalking the Latin American landscape seems to have been enough to convince John Paul that any sympathy shown to those struggling for change is a threat to the Church. The Pope thus seems to equate all “popular” movements with the system he knows beter than any other, and which continues to oppress his homeland.

There is a contrast between John Paul’s obsessional involvement with Poland’s troubles and his detached view of Latin America’s. How much longer, his critics ask, can the Pope treat Poland as his temporal domain, and refuse a political role for the’ Church elsewhere?

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19820302.2.78

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Press, 2 March 1982, Page 18

Word count
Tapeke kupu
1,492

Pope’s role in Poland and Latin America Press, 2 March 1982, Page 18

Pope’s role in Poland and Latin America Press, 2 March 1982, Page 18

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