Keys of This Blood (24 page)

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.

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.

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.

The firing up of the first engine—that rush to material development—was made possible by the worldwide economic-financial hegemony of the United States in the years immediately following World War II. And the force that fired it was the celebrated technological creativity of Americans.

Once scientific technology was harnessed to American entrepreneurship, the first test orbit into the atmosphere of the good life was successfully achieved. More and better things were produced for every sector of life: for the home, the company, the city, the state, the federal government. American innovations in everything from basic home appliances to convenience and luxury goods, and from agricultural methods to military equipment—not to mention the manufacturing and management systems that were produced along the way—developed a post-war
culture that very soon became the envy and the objective of other nations.

In the world of the early 1900s, such development might have remained very much indigenous to the North American continent. In the postwar world, it could not. The United States was rebuilding Europe and Japan. The American dollar anchored local currencies around the world, and whatever kind of international monetary system prevailed. The United Nations, itself headquartered in the United States, brought new nations out of their ancient cultures and into newly born but materially backward nationalisms.

“The world,” said Winston Churchill in 1954—not ten years after the end of World War II—“has grown frighteningly small in compass; and astride it stands the American colossus, whose strength and girth none can match, but whose clothes we all wish to wear.”

The primary purpose of the United States in its technological drive and in its entrepreneurship was economic and financial. The business of America, just as Calvin Coolidge had said in 1929, was still business—balanced budgets; bottom lines in very black ink; a sound dollar.

Such a primary drive had been at work in the U.S.A. since its founding. The culture of Americans—both as a mosaic of immigrant cultures and as a singularly American creation—grew and adapted itself to the quick transformations that changed the quality of life in the nation from 1900 onward. But it was the immense growth and progress of American industrialization, triggered by World War II and by postwar American entrepreneurship, that brought the United States uninterruptedly and without any jarring changes to the threshold of the technotronic era.

By 1960, the American “pursuit of happiness” was concretized in the attainment of the “good life.” And “good” referred primarily to life made easy, leisurely and materially pleasurable. It referred to the quality of life that could be achieved with the introduction of modern technological inventions for the individual, the family, the company, the city, the state and the nation. It was much more than “two chickens in every pot and a car in every garage.” There was a profound change in the moral quality of American life.

By 1960, as well—and largely because the U.S.A. was so deeply involved in the postwar rebuilding of Europe and Japan—the drive for material development had been jump-started in the nations and was sputtering to life around the world. The good life as portrayed in America became the ideal of nations, whether they were in a preindustrial condition or already possessed some degree of industrialization, great or small.

A lot of fuel was poured into the big new engines of development and
entrepreneurship. Worldwide communications—principally television, news networks, and the American film industry—told underdeveloped, undeveloped and developing nations more about the good life than any government brochure. American tourism, which became an important source of annual income and increased wealth for many nations, performed the same task. The increasing importance of the United Nations, and the increasing pace of decolonization of scores of nations in Africa and Asia, emphasized the importance of economic dignity. Undeveloped and underdeveloped nations reclaimed for themselves the right to exploit their own natural resources.

In what seemed no time at all, the full tilt toward development, American style, became quasi universal. The goods of the good life nourished the urge everywhere to develop
à la Américaine
. The automobile replaced the camel in Saudi Arabia. The tea merchant posted outside Beit-El-Ajaib in Zanzibar's Stone Town offered his patrons a Kleenex with every plastic container of lemon tea. The drone of village gossip in Tralee, Ireland, was lost in the blare of “Family Feud” and “Wheel of Fortune,” beamed in by satellite. The bark of Alaskan sled huskies was supplanted by the roar of snowmobiles in Prudhoe Bay. Mukluks were replaced by Mars Bars; and the sewer system in Barrow, Alaska (pop. 3,000), was heated at an annual cost of $239 million.