Posted on 05/24/2003 2:03:49 PM PDT by sinkspur
Although the shooting in Iraq is over, the war of words between Rome and Washington continues, as the Vatican has again criticized American policy in remarkably strong terms. As things turn out, the “clash of cultures” most exacerbated by the Iraq war may not be between Christianity and Islam, but between the Holy See and the United States.
If so, it would mark not a new chapter in relations, but a return to the ambiguity that has long characterized attitudes in Rome to the superpower across the Atlantic. This reserve has been rekindled in recent months not only by the war, but also by the sex abuse crisis, both of which have suggested to Vatican observers that the ghost of John Calvin is alive and well in American culture.
The vehicle for the latest critique was the Jesuit-edited journal Civiltà Cattolica, whose pages are reviewed by the Vatican Secretariat of State before publication. In the lead editorial of its May 17 issue, the journal asserted that “the United States has put international law in crisis.”
The editorial said the U.S.-declared war on terrorism has generated strong anti-American sentiment in Europe. Especially repugnant, it said, has been the decision to hold 600 Taliban, including five teenagers between 13 and 16, and five men over 80, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba without recognizing them as prisoners of war.
In another explosive charge, the editorial said the rebuilding of Iraq is “chancy” because “the western countries that should make it happen seem more interested in exploiting Iraqi oil than in the reconstruction of the country.” It is not the first time Civiltà Cattolica has suggested that oil interests are driving American policy.
The editorial bluntly said the war was unjustified.
Noting that Iraq’s army was weak, and that weapons of mass destruction have not been found, the editorial said these facts “have clearly shown that there were not sufficient reasons for moving against Iraq, because the country did not constitute a true threat for the United States and its allies.”
The editorial said the most urgent task now is to “reestablish international legality, wounded by the ‘unilateralism’ of the United States.” It called for the United Nations, not the United States, to direct the post-war work in Iraq.
“It’s a matter of relaunching the spirit of the United Nations charter, based on cooperation, rather than on competition among enemy states and on domination of an imperialistic sort by the hegemonic superpower.”
Many Americans have been surprised to hear this sort of language, which calls to mind the harsh anti-American broadsides of the European left, from the Holy See.
Indeed, key officials in the Bush administration were initially taken off guard by the depth of Vatican opposition to the war. Condoleeza Rice was not being disingenuous when she told the Italian weekly Panorama that she “didn’t understand” the Vatican’s argument. That incomprehension was widely shared among American personnel both in Washington and in Rome.
The surprise reflects the fact that the political psychology of many Americans, including Bush administration officials, took shape in the Reagan years. During the Cold War there was a clear intersection of interests between the United States and the Holy See in support of anti-Soviet resistance in Eastern Europe, above all Solidarity in Poland. Some American Catholic thinkers, most eminently George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, saw this “holy alliance” as a harbinger of a broader global partnership between America and the Catholic Church, based on shared values (pro-life, pro-family) and on shared political objectives (human rights, economic freedom and democracy).
The project, on this theory, was delayed by eight years of Clinton liberalism, but the election of Bush put things back on track. And indeed, there was a “Catholic honeymoon” in the early days of the Bush administration, as the president’s elimination of public funding for abortion, his restrictive decision on stem cell research, and his two visits to the pope all played to positive Catholic reviews.
From this point of view, the rift over the Iraq war is a temporary disruption of a natural alliance, and the needle will eventually swing back into place. In fact, however, history suggests another hypothesis — that Cold War politics made temporary bedfellows out of the Vatican and the United States, and what is reemerging now is the caution and reluctance that have always characterized Vatican attitudes about America.
Papal reservations are well documented, from Pope Leo XIII’s Testem Benevolentiae, condemning the supposed heresy of “Americanism,” to Pius XII’s opposition to Italy’s entrance into NATO based on fears that the alliance was a Trojan horse for Protestant domination of Catholic Europe. Key Vatican officials, especially Europeans from traditional Catholic cultures, have long worried about aspects of American society — its exaggerated individualism, its hyper-consumer spirit, its relegation of religion to the private sphere, its Calvinist ethos. A fortiori, they worry about a world in which America is in an unfettered position to impose this set of cultural values on everyone else.
The last 18 months have confirmed many Vatican officials in these convictions. Two episodes have been key: the sexual abuse crisis in the American Catholic church, and the Iraq war.
On the crisis, many Vatican observers have been shocked at what they see as the punitive and unforgiving response to priestly misconduct in American culture. Certainly no one in the Holy See defends the sexual abuse of minors, and most realize that the Church left itself vulnerable because of its history of covering up wrongdoing. Still, the clamor for permanent removal from the priesthood of men with even one offense, potentially decades in the past, seems excessive to many in Rome. Even more puzzling was the decision of the American bishops in Dallas to craft policy based on this unforgiving standard. One Vatican cardinal recently asked a delegation of Americans visiting Rome, “How could your bishops adopt a policy so removed from the gospel?”
The war has similarly awakened traditional reservations. When Vatican officials hear Bush talk about the evil of terrorism, and the American mission to destroy that evil, they sometimes sense a worrying kind of dualism. The language can suggest a sense of election, combined with the perversity of America’s enemies, that appears to justify unrelenting conflict.
In the view of some in the Vatican, underlying both the harsh American response on sexual abuse, and its dualistic approach to foreign policy, is the legacy of Calvinism. The Calvinist concepts of the total depravity of the damned, the unconditional election of God’s favored, and the manifestation of election through earthly success, all seem to them to play a powerful role in shaping American cultural psychology.
After Cardinal Pio Laghi returned to Rome from his last-minute appeal to Bush just before the Iraq war began, he told John Paul II that he sensed “something Calvinistic” in the president’s iron determination to battle the forces of international terrorism.
Recently I was in the Vatican, and happened to strike up a conversation with an official eager to hear an American perspective on the war. He told me he sees a “clash of civilizations” between the United States and the Holy See, between a worldview that is essentially Calvinistic and one that is shaped by Catholicism.
“We have a concept of sin and evil too,” he said, “but we also believe in grace and redemption.”
Vatican officials, it should be noted, are not the only ones to detect a strong Calvinist influence in American culture. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago made a similar statement during the Synod of Bishops for the Americas in November 1997. George said that U.S. citizens “are culturally Calvinist, even those who profess the Catholic faith.” American society, he said, “is the civil counterpart of a faith based on private interpretation of Scripture and private experience of God.” He contrasted this kind of society with one based on the Catholic Church's teaching of community and a vision of life greater than the individual.
One can of course debate this line of cultural analysis. Right or wrong, however, it is widely held in the Vatican, and has been strengthened by reflection on both the sex abuse crisis and the war.
This does not mean relations between the United States and the Vatican are in dire straits. The Vatican is realistic enough to understand that if it wishes to exert influence on world affairs it needs to work with the Americans, and the Bush team continues to desire the moral legitimacy it believes Vatican support can lend its policies. At a personal level, Bush’s emissaries to the Holy See, especially Ambassador James Nicholson and his staff, are liked and respected in the apostolic palace. None of this is likely to change.
What seems increasingly clear, however, is that this is not destined to be the “special relationship” enjoyed by American and Britain, allies linked by a common history, language, and worldview. This is a dialogue between two institutions with some common interests, but also divergent cultures that will from time to time flare up into sharp policy differences.
No one should be shocked, in other words, the next time Civiltà Cattolica takes America to task.
* * *
Really, they think American parents overreact when preists bugger their children?
The Vatican is soooo out of whack on this issue that one wonders if it actually has a stake and design on somehow leading a suggested UN-proxied/One World Government?
It is Power, not saving souls that the "new" Vatican seems most interested in these days...
The men who surround John Paul II are not exactly fans of the United States. Cardinal Solodano, the Secretary of State, allowed his undersecretary, Archbishop Martino, to label the Iraq war "A crime against humanity."
Many of the others are Euros and South Americans, who distrust the United States and are, deep down, jealous of the influence this country has in the world.
As Father Richard Neuhaus, editor of FIRST THINGS, put it recently: "The lead-up to the Iraq war was not this papacy's finest hour."
So mass graves, frivolous executions, rape, tree shredders, acid baths, electrocution and tyranny mean nothing to the leaders of the Catholic Church?
These men don't sound much different at all from the tyrrants who abused the power of the Church during Quasimodo's time.
John Paul is so frail, I frankly don't think he authorizes any of this anti-American stuff.
Prairie
presented as semi-fact --
flat out alleges
that the Catholic Church
today is undergoing
a tough, civil war,
with conservative
Christian Catholics fighting
"worldly" almost
anti-Christian blocs
within the Church. (At one point,
the author presents
a scene where the pope
is threatened by a US
politician with
assassination
if the pope were to speak out
about the US
agenda to link
"population control" to
foreign policy...)
The lack of the rest of the world in responding to numerous massacres in Africa, the Middle East and eastern Europe, which have cost millions upon millions their lives, has done much more to put international law in crisis than our liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq. These idiots still don't get it.
Well, according to their bible, so is sodomy.
Politically, the Vatican (along with the leadership of other mainline Christian sects) stands firmly in the camp of the Axis of Weasels. I wonder if they realize where that commitment will take the world?
Eyes might open if al-Qaeda manages to fly a plane into the dome of St. Peter's in Rome.
But, there is a certain naivete in denominational religion that simply refuses to believe that there are those for whom "can't we all just get along" is totally foreign.
Pope John Paul II never uttered a single word of condemnation of Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses, abuses which continue to be documented and are worse than anyone imagined.
He has also never expressed public gratitude and thanks to God for the freedom from tyranny of 24 million Iraqis.
So this is why the Vatican was against the US Iraqi war? The Catholic Church is still fighting Protestant reformation of 500 years ago. They still think in terms of Protestants vs. Catholics. No wonder Condi is confused.
In the view of some in the Vatican, underlying both the harsh American response on sexual abuse, and its dualistic approach to foreign policy, is the legacy of Calvinism. The Calvinist concepts of the total depravity of the damned, the unconditional election of God’s favored, and the manifestation of election through earthly success, all seem to them to play a powerful role in shaping American cultural psychology
"Dualistic approach to foreign policy..." Huh? "Total depravity of the damned..." You guys having trouble spotting the bad guys? "The unconditional election of God's favored, and the manifestation of election through earthly success... What? you guys whining about Bush's 2000 victory? Because Bush is a pious person who’s not Catholic?
Now, if Donald Rumsfeld can classify the "Old Europe" so to can the Vatican be classified the "Old Church". Perhaps some dynamism can be instilled in it by the nomination of an African or Asian as Pontiff (or even a North American). Until then, the Old Church, with an attenuated Jesuit society and a sclerotic Italian heirarchy in train, will continue to lose relevance.
Many of the others are Euros and South Americans, who distrust the United States and are, deep down, jealous of the influence this country has in the world.
It appears that these men are adherents of "liberation theology," which to me means leftist dogma overcomes and manipulates Christian dogma. The non-religious left is on a campaign against Bush who they cast as the secular anti-christ (or secular christ, depending on your point of view).
Notice that they almost universally say that it's not America but George Bush (and the "neocons") who are the problem. This article does paint with the broad brush of blaming "Americans," but it's clear that their problem is with this administration.
Bush (et al) believes in a personal relationship with God through his savior, Jesus Christ. He believes in people, not communities. He believes in right and wrong, not moral relativism. Deep down the men who surround the Pope don't believe in those things.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.