February 1979 Print

Mary Martinez writes from Rome

 

 

While continuing to maintain silence regarding the content of his audience with Pope John Paul, Archbishop Lefebvre spoke to a reporter from the Paris daily L'Aurore concerning ordinations to the diaconate which took place at Ecône on Christmas Eve. Referring to the Pope he said, "We must now wait to see what he does at the Latin American Bishops' Conference in Mexico." "How he conducts himself" is the literal translation. By the time this issue of THE ANGELUS is printed the CELAM conference will be taking place and before that the Archbishop will have fulfilled the request of Cardinal Seper, Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, to return to Rome for further discussions.

Nothing shows more clearly that there is a new style, a new way of doing things in the Vatican, than this handling of the "Lefebvre question". No longer do we hear emotional pronouncements from the Chair of Peter. No more the media exposure causing most of the world's TV teams to rush frantically from one Alban Hill to another. No more the misinterpreted statements and half-enunciated recriminations. No more the 16-page papal letters. The new way is smooth and efficient. Virtually without disturbing its year-long, quite effective, campaign of silence the Vatican undertook to summon the Archbishop, covering the invitation, as in 1976, with the fiction that the audience had been granted at his request. The 30 minutes of two years ago was extended to two hours. One can imagine that the tone this time was generally even-tempered, possibly cordial with the clear, immovable logic of the Frenchman meeting the obscurity of post-Conciliar speculation—Aristotle's "that which is, is; that which is not, is not" meeting the phenomenologists' "what, after all, is reality?" The Church-of-all-Time confronting the Church-in-Search.

Just how deep the commitment of the present Pope is to the un-Catholic philosophy known as phenomenology, according to which substance is considered to be an illusion, will only become clear when his published writings are translated from Polish. It was in 1960, shortly after the publication of a treatise on the German phenomenologist Max Scheler (whose "search" took him from the Catholic Faith to Buddhism before his death in 1928) that the 40-year-old Karol Wojtyla, two years a bishop, attracted the attention of the Vatican. It was Gabriel Garonne then Bishop of Toulouse and one day to become the chief "inquisitor" of Archbishop Lefebvre, who suggested to Pope John that the brilliant Polish intellectual could play a vital role in the forthcoming Council. The document to which his talents were put to work (in what the Vatican press office called "a determining way") was Gaudium et Spes or the Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, the document which, to quote Michael Davies, "expresses the ethos of Vatican II more accurately than any other." American Bishop Russell McVinney called it "a doubtful compromise with everything which lies at the basis of the evils now affecting humanity" and Cardinal Heenan said it was a treatise unworthy of any Catholic Council. Archbishop Lefebvre, who refused his signature to Gaudium et Spes, pointed to the anti-Catholic philosophical sources of the document, citing Locke, Rousseau and Lamennais.

This notably long-winded, bland Constitution, in the way of Maritain's integral humanism, would have the Church "make common cause with others" to "build a more human world." Referred to half a dozen times in virtually every discourse delivered by Pope Paul, the Church in the Modern World denied condemnation to the greatest threat to the Church in the modern world, namely, atheistic Marxism. Facing conservative opposition on the floor of the Council Bishop Wojtyla explained that atheism was "too complicated a subject to be dealt with in Gaudium et Spes."

Even as Paul VI referred to Jacques Maritain as his teacher, so John Paul II told a Roman crowd that Pope Paul had been to him "a real father" and that his greatest wish was to be his heir and to "take up his staff as a pilgrim of peace." The line is clear. With new freshness and energy Pope Wojtyla is extending the commitments of Pope Montini.

To those of us who cover top international meetings in Rome the position of Cardinal Wojtyla as a leading, probably the leading, Vatican theologian has been clear for some time. For the past seven years he has been one of only three European bishops attached to the Permanent Episcopal Synod which is headed by Vatican-based, Polish-born Archbishop Rubin. Cardinal Wojtyla was the official theologian of the 1974 World Synod on "evangelization"—a phenomenon without substance if ever there was one. Evangelization (related, one had to assume to the Catholic duty of propagating the Faith) as the 200 or so carefully selected bishops saw it, is something lived and felt; it has nothing whatsoever to do with converting the world or even one single soul to the Roman Catholic religion. In the same perverse way the 1977 Synod, in which the Cardinal again played an important part, affirmed that "catechesis" is something lived and felt; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the teaching of the dogmatic truths of the Roman Catholic religion. When the pro-Marxist president of the French Episcopal Conference, Archbishop Roger Etchegaray, held a symposium of his all-Europe (East and West) Episcopal Council in Rome in 1976 the chief "idea-man" was again Cardinal Wojtyla. It was there that he formulated and proclaimed the upside-down idea that the bishop (from the Greek episkopos i.e. "overseer") is a "servant of society."

If Msgr. Lefebvre advised waiting for CELAM in Puebla I don't think he meant it would tell him more about the basic attitudes of the new Pope whose career he had probably been following since coming upon his resistance to anti-communism on the floor of the Council.

However it is interesting to note this cautious "wait and see" from a man who had lately come from a lengthy discussion with the Pope, one who has wide and important contacts in Rome and to compare his prudence with the brash, foregone conclusions spread by journalists like Malachi Martin who, to my knowledge, has not been in Rome in recent years. Who can tell how many Americans were taken in by his recent series of articles syndicated through United Features in which, among other inventions and contrary to every scrap of evidence available, Martin transformed the Vatican II "expert" and dedicated ecumenist Pope Luciani into a man of "extreme and intransigent traditionalism." Where, among the skyscrapers of Manhattan, did Martin come upon the "news" that the same pope was going to "reinstate the old Latin Mass as the preferred form of worship" when it is a matter of record—of a whole series of published letters—that, as Patriarch of Venice he not only opposed the group of laity who tried to organize a Tridentine Mass Center in the abandoned Church of San Simeone Piccolo but opposed them with bitterness and derision?

But it is one thing to get all the facts wrong about a dead pope (Martin is not the only journalist guilty of that) and quite another to confidently predict a whole pontificate-to-be on the basis of false information. Take his claim that the young Karol Wojtyla worked in the Polish underground. The men and women who did, know each other and a colleague of mine was one of them. Interviewing Cardinal Wojtyla several years ago she made a plea for aid to the Poles-in-exile scattered around the world and growing old. She found him polite and visibly uninterested.

As for predictions about the new papacy, the final Martin article in the series jumps from bold assumption to bold assumption. Nearly every paragraph begins "Pope John Paul thinks" or "He is of the opinion that" or "What the Pope wants is". Not even the doyen of the Vatican press corps, Max Bergere, who has spent every working morning for the last 45 years in the Vatican press rooms and who has covered four conclaves for France Presse would dare to begin a sentence, with the assumption that he knows "what the Pope wants" or "thinks"—let alone what he is going to do in the future. At least one of the Martin pronouncements boomeranged even as it was being printed. "Pope John Paul regards the ecumenism of Western Europe and America as a dead end," his article was saying even as the said Pope was cheering on a full assembly of European and American ecumenists at the Secretariat for Christian Unity in Rome with the words, "Go ahead with confidence!"

In line with Msgr. Lefebvre's advice to wait and see I make no predictions about the Puebla Conference, but if I may venture a journalist's guess it would be that the Mexican meetings will add up to a fairly conservative phenomenon totally lacking in orthodox substance. Readers familiar with Fr. Joaquin Saenz account of the 1968 Eucharistic Congress and CELAM meetings in Columbia will remember that that was when the so-called liberation theology got underway. Ten years have brought stiff reaction to Church-sponsored subversion in Latin America. Military governments have been established in country after country.

West German Catholics, the chief financiers of CELAM, have grown wary, seeing their Sunday collections go to support revolution. And here, there and everywhere the traditional movement is growing. The fact that Pope John Paul summoned Archbishop Lefebvre to Rome during his first few weeks in office shows how heavily this presence has begun to weigh on the Vatican. It is not impossible, that making a good impression on the conservatives (potential traditionalists if things get wilder) is thought to be more expedient, at least for the time being, than urging on the progressives.

Should this be the case it will cause confusion even among the traditionalists unless they remember that this vigorous and attractive third post-Conciliar Pope is thoroughly committed to the tenets of Gaudium et Spes, the Council document he helped to create. That is the reason "why he refused crown and throne, why he made only one genuflection" and no sign of the cross during the Puritan-style inauguration ceremonies, why he addresses the faithful as "brothers and sister", why he re-confirmed Pope Paul's curial appointments, why he tells ecumenists to carry on, why he took the names John and Paul and why he calls Paul VI his spiritual father. With these facts in mind there should be no confusion.

Asked by Italian journalists why a foreigner had been elected, the knowledgeable and authoritative Cardinal Benelli answered, "Nationality is of no importance in the Church. What counted in the Conclave is the fact that not one of the Cardinals who took part was known to be more deeply committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council than Karol Wojtyla."

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Mrs. Martinez, a traditionalist, is a reporter accredited to the Vatican. She makes her home in Rome, Italy

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