The Pope With the Human Face is the preposterous title of the latest book about Pope John Paul II. The major Italian publishing house, Rizzoli, is bringing it out and the presentation is to be made by the militantly un-Catholic (not quite the same in Italy as anti-Catholic) Minister of Public Instruction, Giovanni Spadolini. The authors, two TV commentators, have had the good luck to receive one of the chapters from the pen of the Pope himself. Excerpts from the chapter have just been published by the Milan newspaper, Corriere della Sera, until recently edited by Spadolini. The article deals with the ever-raging question of terrorism.

"I myself, the Pope, in order to go through the streets to visit a parish or a neighborhood, have to be guarded by so many police. My God, this is inconceivable! One thing is clear: terrorism, violence, kidnapping, the terrible acts which strike at the dignity and the individual liberty of so many people, families, nations, are facts which degrade the very concept of society itself." Pope John Paul proceeds to explain the cause of the trouble. It is, he says, the fact that "tumultuous and rapid social progress has failed to iron out the inequalities between classes, it has failed to distribute the opportunities for work and well-being equally and it has failed to resolve the problem of the poor. All these failures of social progress, he explains, have resulted in a distorted vision of life, a vision which is too detached from the moral and spiritual values of man."

Back in 1925, a time which can only seem to us in the 1970s as an Age of Innocence, Pope Pius XI was answering a similar question in a strikingly different way. To, "What are the chief causes of the difficulties under which mankind is laboring," he answered, "the fact that the majority of men have thrust Jesus Christ and His holy law out of their lives." In the first paragraph of the encyclical Quas Primas, he recalled the thesis of his first encyclical Ubi Arcano, written three years before, a thesis expressed in this sentence: "With God excluded from political life, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of authority has been taken away because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated." The answer is straightforward.

The answer of Pope John Paul, on the other hand, tells us only what did not happen, what rapid social progress did not do. The reader is left to deduce (since both "social" and "progress" are considered positive words) that the social progress to which he refers—the free capitalistic kind that has flourished in terrorist-plagued countries like Italy—must be the wrong kind and that the right kind would have been state socialism which is well known to have as its goals the levelling of classes, the allotment of equal work and affluence and the solving of the problem of the poor.

Going on to cite the remedy for the evils of his day, Pope Pius was again explicit: "If kings and elected magistrates are filled with the persuasion that they rule, not by their own right but by the mandate and in the place of the Divine King, they will exercise their authority wisely . . ."

Pope John Paul's remedy: "It is necessary to create the conditions for a more human and more secure life." He calls for urgent reforms, for "audacious, profoundly innovating transformations" because, he says, "it, is not just nor human nor Christian to continue certain ignoble situations in which there is a place for the exploitation of man by man." This is also the way he spoke in Oaxaca last February.

James Burnham, in his brilliant study of liberalism, Suicide of the West, notes that a basic tenet of the Left is to consider faulty social institutions as the real obstacle to the achievement of the good society. "Society, according to liberal thinking, is responsible for social evils. Our attitude toward those who embody those evils—of crime, war, terrorism, hunger—should be the elimination of the social conditions which are the source of the evils." It is the audacious, profoundly innovating transformation which will stop terrorism in Italy, the Pope writes, and not—here he is very explicit—"the persecution of other men and other groups of men."

During the past month some light has finally been shed on the very evil the papal article deals with, namely, political terrorism. With virtual impunity for over seven years the so-called Red Brigades have been carrying on with armed robberies, arson, kidnappings, murders, and the blowing up of premises. Even after the Aldo Moro murder a year ago, the screen of protection seemed to hold. Police refrained from persecuting such men or groups of men. Suddenly the protection has been ripped away, at least from one sector of the gang, with the arrest of a Padua University professor and several of his associates.

In National Review for April 14, 1978, I told the story of the autonomi, the Red youth who have defected from the Communist Party because they maintain that it never comes across with its promised audacious transformations, preferring to play parliamentary games with the Christian Democrats. With voting beginning at 18 the PCI fears a considerable loss of votes in the forthcoming general election, but more than that they fear the bad odor engendered by the terrorists who vaunt the Red flag, hammer, and sickle at the scenes of their crimes. Communist leaders publicly approve and encourage the police breakthrough which may not peter out after election day, June 3.

Pertinent to Pope John Paul's essay on terrorism in The Pope With the Human Face is the fact that what the investigation has turned up are not victims of capitalism's mistaken social progress but men whom the status quo has provided with enviable human and secure lives. The key figure and the man who may be found to have projected, managed and directed the kidnapping and murder of ex-Prime Minister Aldo Moro, is the Professor of Political Science, Antonio "Toni" Negri, who enjoys the comfortable salary of a fulltime docente to which he adds a second income from his lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris.

It is the French connection that is bringing investigators excitingly close to the heart of the terrorist matter and which may cause them to turn aside before looking all the way. It has long been suspected and once, at least, clearly revealed, that political violence in Italy works out of two basic non-Italian centers—the so-called "Think Tank" in Paris and the "Information Center" in Prague. Whether these units work together or in opposition is not clear. However, the Italian journalist who exposed the workings of these centers was sentenced to life-long solitary confinement last February on another charge for which no explicit incriminating evidence was ever revealed to the public.

The Toni Negri investigation is reminding Italians that, like the Holy Father himself, terrorism in Italy comes from a distant land. And it comes with ease and confidence, thanks to 17 years of per permissiveness and collaboration with the Socialists on the part of the Vatican-sponsored Christian Democrat Party. This majority party never wanted to persecute "other men or groups of men" who had as their objective the breaking down of Christian society.

Since it is not quite fair to compare the careful, studied words of a papal encyclical with the excerpts from an article, even a papal article, it is well to consider briefly the first encyclical of Pope John Paul II. Redemptor Hominis was presented to the Vatican press corps on March 15 by Roberto Tucci, S.J., former editor of Civilta Cattolica and now the director of Vatican Radio. He was one of the drafters of the Vatican II Document on Religious Freedom and the first Catholic to speak at an assembly of the World Council of Churches. At Uppsala in 1969, Fr. Tucci said there were no doctrinal reasons why the Roman Catholic Church could not join the WCC and he expressed the hope that it would.

In presenting the new encyclical to us, Fr. Tucci called it a "hymn to man" and went on to explain that the cristocentric emphasis of the document, "the constant reference to the mystery of Christ, excluding as it does an ecclesio-centric vision, makes the Church appear as a subordinate reality, not as an end in itself. One cannot escape from the fact . . . that (this emphasis) has a great ecumenical importance."

At first glance the average Catholic may not grasp the significance of this emphasis as readily as an expert ecumenist like the learned Jesuit but Section 6 of the first chapter is clear enough. After sanctioning the work of Cardinal Willebrands' Secretariat for Chrstian Unity as the proper road for "the attainment of that unity willed by Christ" the Pope asks repeatedly if we have the right not to carry on along this path. Do we, in fact, dare not to? Would we not otherwise be unfaithful to Christ who prayed, "may they all be one"?

Redemptor Hominis is permeated with the indefinite, questioning, imprecise language of the Council documents and the discourses or Pope Paul VI. One of the journalists at the Vatican press conference asked Fr. Tasci how it was possible that on page 40 of the encyclical one reads, "Jesus Christ is the chief way for the Church" and on page 43, "Man is the primary and fundamental way for the Church." What even does "way" in this context mean and with no verb following the phrase "for the Church," what does that add up to?

The word "mystery" in the catechism referred to a specific and limited number of truths—the Real Presence, for one—which are admittedly beyond human understanding. In Conciliar and post-Conciliar writings the word runs wild. In Redemptor Hominis we find the mystery of the Church, the mystery of the Father, the mystery of Christ, the mystery of the Redemption, the mystery of man. Then, words continually go off base so that the Church is referred to as a "sacrament." Conservative Cardinal Ruffini objected to that shift on the floor of the Council. "Such reference is obscure and requires long explanations." He noted that George Tyrell, apostate priest and leader of the Modernists, had used precisely that expression and that it was censored as heretical.

It is the obscurity of these writings through their manipulation of language that makes reading them such a frustrating and essentially unenjoyable task. To come again on an encyclical of 1925, in spite of the bridge over such a deeply dividing time as the last five decades, is like coming into a familiar room where everything is in its place. In Quas Primas the very learned Achille Ratti was writing about real things on earth and in heaven. Reading it again after Redemptor Hominis is like taking a deep breath of bracing salt air after a day below decks.

Readers are reminded that Mary Martinez's book, FROM ROME URGENTLY, is now available. Simply address the author, Via Sommacampagna 47, 00185 Rome, Italy, and enclose an international money order for $8.50. The price includes airmail postage.