Thus, the West has not merely been persuaded, it has joined in persuading itself, that all our communal ills—environmental, civil, political, religious—are of its own doing.
So widespread has Pope John Paul found this attitude to be by now that he frequently encounters it as the dominant and motivating “belief system” among many of his own bishops, priests and religious in the West nations, as well as among the authorities in other churches. The United States, as the leader of the West nations, is accepted as the archvillain of international life.
However, just as John Paul roundly rejects the principles of balance and containment as the bastard children of the principle of moral equivalence, so he rejects the industry of blame as yet another bastard child of the Big Lie.
Pope John Paul II insists, as the Church always insists, that in any moral appraisal of East and West for the existence and maintenance of sinful structures, there must be a just distribution of responsibility. And he insists that this is both possible and necessary because, as he is ever mindful, sinful structures never just pop up like mushrooms in a damp forest. They are always and only brought into being and nurtured into systematic power by dedicated groups of men and women who have a goal in mind.
In this regard, in fact, the Pontiff makes an important distinction. He stresses the fact that in neither bloc of nations, East or West, did the populations at large have anything effective to say or do about the institutionalization of sinful structures in their midst. In East and West alike, it was the chief protagonists of the systems who were coresponsible.
It is John Paul’s considered opinion and principle of action and reaction that, above all today, at the opening of the nineties, when most of the captive nations of the East are shaking off the chains that bound them so helplessly to the USSR, a moral appraisal of the nations’ behavior over the past forty years is a required prelude to any sound consideration of what must now be the principle of behavior as regards both those formerly captive nations and their captor, the USSR. It will not do to deceive oneself and say that “the West has waited patiently for this [the revolt of the satellites] to take place. Our policy of containment paid off!”
Papa Wojtyla’s appraisal of those North-South, East-West coordinates appears in three main judgments comprehensively answering the query: Who has been morally responsible for the creation and maintenance of those two crippling coordinates of world crisis?
As regards the North-South coordinate, he pronounced a very solemn judgment when speaking in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso (the former Upper Volta), in West Africa: “The earth is becoming sterile across an immense area, malnutrition is chronic for tens of millions of people, too many children die. Is it possible that such a need is not felt by all humanity? … Shouldn’t the ‘developed’ societies ask themselves what model they present to the rest of the world, about the needs they [the developed societies] have created, and even about the origin of the riches that have become necessary for them?” The “developed” world (the North) has treated Third World nations “as clients and as debtors who are more or less solvent,” but “that attitude, whether conscious or not, has already led to too many dead ends.”
The remedy? One must imagine that lone white-robed figure standing on the wasting fringes of the deadly blowing sands of the Sahel, crying obstinately and authoritatively over a sea of black imploring faces in an effort to reach the ears of Europe, the United States, Japan, the “Asian Tigers,” and the USSR, “In the name of justice, the Bishop of Rome, the successor to Peter, begs his brothers and sisters around the world not to scorn the hungry of this continent [Africa], not to deny them the universal right to human dignity and the security of life.”
Only the Bishop of Rome, only the one man holding the Keys of divine authority guaranteed by the human blood of God made man, could even venture to brandish them in that Ouagadougou—in all the miserable Ouagadougous of the South nations.
As for the East-West coordinate of opposition and mistrust and human waste, John Paul’s moral judgment can be sought in his addresses, speeches, sermons and conversations during the months of 1989 and into 1990, when the “Gorbachevist” liberation movement started.
There is no doubt in Papa Wojtyla’s mind that the creation and maintenance of the Gulag empire was the work of those dedicated to establishing the Leninist “proletarian revolution” worldwide. But, entwined with that primary moral responsibility of the USSR and of all the USSR’s surrogates, supporters, clients, fellow travelers, “moles” and “frontmen,” there is the secondary responsibility of the capitalist West, which from the beginning and for the whole of the Leninist lifetime connived at the perpetuation of that evil system just because the West concluded that its peace, security and profits lay along that way.
John Paul’s third moral judgment concerns the distribution of moral responsibility for the successful and godly conduct of the new phase of East-West relationships opened up by the dawn of Gorbachevism in the USSR and Eastern Europe.
Again, the prime moral responsibility lies on the shoulders of the Party-State: the men who ran it—the nomenklatura—as well as their surrogates and supporters outside the USSR. But secondary and by no means less important is the responsibility of the West. Having connived, with the Kennan doctrine of containment as the umbrella principle of action, with the “evil empire,” for so long and with such dire human consequences, the West now has a moral obligation to give of itself in order to heal the grievous wound inflicted on so many millions of humanity during the lifetime of more than two generations.
Here, Papa Wojtyla tries to point out the nature of that deep wound. There is now a common illusion in the West that freedom has broken out in all the former Soviet satellites, and that with that democratic freedom will come not only democratic egalitarianism but all the virtues entertained—at least originally—by the proponents of freedom. But this is mere illusion.
The human devastation in the former members of the Gulag system lies far deeper than can be reached by a supply of dishwashers, VCRs, bank accounts, luxury foods, convenience goods, plentiful necessities, free media, free elections. The populations of those former satellites have no ideology, no set of moral principles, no ethic, no goals—other than an immediate and full participation in the “good life” as they have longingly seen it presented by Western media: the rip-roaring hedonism of J.R. in “Dallas,” the meteoric acquisitions of huge dollar fortunes by Western entrepreneurs, the limitless stretches of sexuality as propounded in the flourishing pornography establishment of the West, and the politics of no higher authority than the demands of each human self.
This, as many sociologists in Europe are already beginning to remark, is a movement in those East populations that should be labeled the “no-idea movement.” It is a violent reaching out for the objective—the good life—without any guiding credo, without any ideology worthy of those who ostensibly are fleeing the crass materialism and amoral godlessness of the Gulag.
Of course, as John Paul points out, each man and woman in the Gulag will answer to God for their individual actions. But over and above their individual responsibilities, they have been unwilling victims of the sinful structures at which the West connived for so long.
The West therefore has incurred a moral responsibility for a holistic healing of that deep communal wound; and, for that healing, not merely a flood of dollars and an array of joint ventures will suffice. There has to be a healing of minds, a curing of the soul’s disease. John Paul is insistent: Europe—the “new Europe” eyed by East and West—“can only be built on the spiritual principles that originally made Europe possible,” he told visiting “Europeans” at the end of January 1990.
In facing the changes now taking place throughout the Gulag archipelago, the West and Pope John Paul differ profoundly in the interpretation of what those changes forebode.
The general feeling abroad in the West is that the “Cold War” has ended, that Communism is bankrupt and that the changes are
irreversible, even if Mikhail Gorbachev is swept aside by the internal ills of the USSR. At its most morally perceptive, this general feeling in the West glories—and rightly so—in the apparent triumph of democratic ideas, the departure of those Stalinist relics—Todor Zhivkov from Bulgaria, Erich Honecker from East Germany, János Kádár from Hungary, Milos Jakes from Czechoslovakia, Wojciech Jaruzelski from Poland.
These new initiatives apart, we are now recording a widespread impression or conviction reflected in public commentaries, by columnists, in the words of statesmen and the manifestos and declarations of particular groups—cultic, humanistic, philosophic, even religious. It is, to phrase it in ordinary words, that some important change is taking place. But further precisions are hard to come by; and many who probe the matter, seeking some further precision, end up with a rosy-hued optimism or in dithering doubt.
The impression or conviction in this matter is very fragile and volatile, just like our perception of sunlight in the autumn. Watching the sun’s reflection in a frequented room, in early fall, your awareness is caught by a subtle change in the light. It is ever so slight. But it is there. You marvel at it because it seems so slight. Yet it has a clarity unnoticed for some time. Then doubt sets in: Is it because something is changing in you—a new clarity in certain matters, a shift brought about by external events and your own inner development? Or is it a change in the quality of the light that produces a change in you? For we, with all other things in our cosmos, do change. So, finally, when all is said about these changes, does a severe doubt amounting to an anxiety hover in the minds of Western onlookers of the chaotic scene.
What, in other words, people in the West are asking, is happening in this era of Gorbachevism’s first impact? Is there a big change under way in the society of nations (the USSR included)? Or is it all a trick of our autumn sunlight, an illusion, therefore, a darkening of our vision? Has the society of nations been taken unconsciously captive by someone who may be the prime master in the exquisite art of political illusion on a grand scale?
There is no such doubt running through the Roman Catholic papacy and its reading of events: from Pius XI through Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, up to the present holder of the Petrine Keys of authoritative teaching about the good and the bad in human affairs. Even a John XXIII, who made the first papal overtures to the USSR and was betrayed in his trust, and a Paul VI, who was totally outclassed in this confused arena of East-West relations—even they faithfully transmitted the unchanging judgment of the Roman Catholic papacy.
That is: Nothing short of a religious and moral conversion of the people of the USSR, accompanied by a similar change in the West, will solve the ever-intensifying geopolitical crisis, and allow the fierce millennium endgame to result in a peace that can be accurately called human—precisely because it will have a divine blessing.
This judgment of the ever-continuing papacy comes reinforced by the sustained memory of the papacy, which, from the beginning of the Soviet Party-State, has watched each of the Champions of Hammer and Sickle and fully comprehended what is involved in the Leninist creation. Memory of that seventy-three-year-old history from Lenin to Gorbachev is the key to accurate interpretation of present events.
Three
Champions of
Hammer and Sickle
9
The Hall of Heroes
In the Hall of Communism’s Heroes, Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin are ringed around with the ranks of no mean comrades.
Karl Kautsky, for example. A follower of Marx, Kautsky did more than systematize Marx’s theories. More learned as a philosopher and more authoritative about Marxism than Marx himself, Kautsky came to be known as the “pope of international socialism”—a touch of irony he and Marx might have savored! And there was Friedrich Engels, of course, who was somewhat more humanistic and certainly more practical-minded than Karl Marx, but not a whit less bitter or less bloody-minded. As a lifelong colleague of Marx and Communist activist, he helped make the penniless Marx financially viable for most of his life.
Obscure as they may now be, there were hundreds of others among the “international socialist fraternity” who would be in such a Hall of Heroes. Men such as G. V. Plekhanov and P. B. Axelrod, for example, who pinpointed the masses of workers—the proletariat—as the pivot of any successful revolution, and so set the basic lines of Lenin’s thinking about a Russian birth for political Marxism.
Even before Marx, there were some dozen social theorists and active experimenters who would have their hero’s niches too. Wales’s Robert Owen, with his “New Harmony” foundation in Indiana, and France’s Charles Fournier, with his original “Phalanx” of workers, are but two who must come quickly to mind.
Name as many more such men as you please, however, and list all their accomplishments, and still the preeminent dais must be reserved for just those two. For Karl Marx, who developed a novel way of thinking about the death and burial of all social classes in the world, except the “working class”; and for Vladimir Lenin, the fierce and resourceful activist—the one man who set out to create an international body that would bring about the actual and violent death of capitalism. The man who would entomb capitalism beneath the sun-kissed meadows of a nearfuture and totally this-worldly “Paradise of the Workers.”
Like many others born and bred in the sterile world created by Leninist Marxism—like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, or like Milovan Djilas of Yugoslavia—Karol Wojtyla watched the twilight shadows lengthen decade by decade over that cruel and sterile Paradise. From the start of his pontificate, therefore, John Paul had been preparing for some sweeping and possibly convulsive change that he knew was inevitable in the Soviet East. And he was certain that once it came, such a change would have its profound effects in the very foundations of the capitalist West, tied as it had been for so long with the East nations.
In his mind, therefore, Pope John Paul II has always reserved two more places of special distinction in that Hall of Communism’s Heroes. It was always possible, he thought, that a virtually forgotten Sardinian by the name of Antonio Gramsci would rise from the little covert of obscurity assigned him by Lenin, to claim his own and special place as nothing less than a genius of Marxist pragmatism. The remaining place on the dais, John Paul has always thought, would be reserved for the first Soviet leader with the practical sense, the breadth of mind and the political daring to listen at long last to Antonio Gramsci.
As it has turned out, that place will probably be occupied by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Since the emergence of Gorbachev as the standard-bearer of expected and long-overdue change, John Paul has focused on certain basic points about him, and about his Gorbachevism, that provide the most accurate reading of the mind and intent of the Soviet leader, and that therefore most accurately foretell the future course of his policies.
For those who share the Pope’s belief, mind and outlook, the point of greatest significance about Gorbachev is that he is the head of the only government, and leader of the only political ideology in the world and in all of recorded history, that are officially antireligious—officially based on a belief that everything about human life is material. In all its manifestations and abilities and destiny, there is nothing more to mankind beyond gross matter. That is a basic belief of the genuine Marxist. As the Pontiff knows from the deep experience of a lifetime, any claim to the contrary is put forward as pretext, and is accepted out of ignorance or connivance or wishful thinking.
For the other contenders in the geopolitical arena with these two Slavs, Pope John Paul II and President Gorbachev, meanwhile—whether or not such contenders share the belief, mind and outlook of either one—the point of greatest significance about Mikhail Gorbachev is exactly parallel to the point of greatest significance about John Paul. For just as the Pontiff’s foothold on the geopolitical plane derives from his position as the head of the world’s only georeligious institution, so Gorbachev’s foothold on the geopolitical plane is guaranteed him by
the fact that he is titular head of the world’s only existing geo-ideology—the Soviet Marxist version of Communism.
In strictly geopolitical terms, in other words, the parallel between these two leaders holds firm because of one simple and inescapable circumstance: At a critical moment in world history, each assumed an office through which he inherited an already functioning and geopolitically structured institution.
Geopolitically, it matters little that Gorbachev has but six predecessors—Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko—whose lives taken together span barely more than a single century, while John Paul’s 263 predecessors reach back to Simon Peter as the first to take in hand the Keys of authority as Christ’s earthly Vicar.
For in the geopolitical arena, it is not age or lineage, but institutional structure and historical opportunity, that are the operative factors of overriding importance.
There are other factors about Gorbachev, and about Gorbachevism, that are of prime significance in John Paul’s thinking.
For one thing, the Pope recognized in Mikhail Gorbachev a leader as deeply endowed as he is himself with an instinct for the geopolitical issue. The Soviet leader has his eyes fixed just as surely as the Pontiff does on a geopolitical goal. Each man, in fact, displays precisely those talents that facilitate his geopolitical policy and action in order to attain the goal he has in mind.
John Paul II, himself emergent from the maw of the Russian Bear, is as intimately acquainted as Gorbachev with the lineaments and the gut issues of the Soviet system. For more than one visiting representative from free-world governments who seek the Pontiff out in this matter, as in many others, he has ticked off the early highlights and pointed to the future aims of Gorbachev’s innovation. “Gorbachev,” he remarked to one such visitor, “is potentially as great an innovator as his founding father, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to you Anglo-Saxons as Lenin.”
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