Pope John Paul in Mexico
Peter Nichols
Mexico City The finest London drama critic to emerge after the war once opened his review of a brilliant if misguided performance of Othello by saying that those lucky few who were present at this spellbinding performance would have to grow used in the years to come to being asked constantly to recount what it was like.
The day John Paul II spent in Puebla de Los Angeles will have this same quality. The authorities had cut off the supply of drink which was the one de-dramatising element in a situation which was nevertheless heady enough with or without alcohol. The banked masses of welcoming humanity were either shouting deliriously or, some of them, suddenly stunned into silence when the white-clad figure standing in an open bus drove slowly past them. His own face showed the emotion felt by the first Pope to come to Mexico for the first straight encounter with Catholicism's problems in South America — which are probably the biggest he will ever have to face in the course of his reign. The meeting which he came to open of Latin American hierarchies represents what will soon be a half of the whole Catholic world, and opinions are deeply divided on which way the future lies. Tension within the Church is high, and even if the point had not been made repeatedly before, the Pope kept telling the conference that the eyes of the world were focussed on its deliberations.
The Pope, in fact, set himself three aims in coming to Mexico. The first was the most simple. Readers of Mr Graham Greene will have no difficulty in recalling that the last priest left alive in Mexico was knocking on a door at the end of The Power and the Glory. Mexico is still the only Latin American country to have no diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Yet now the country was to be host to representatives of all the Catholic hierarchies of the sub-continent. Only the presence of the Pope himself was required to show that the real prestige of the church could in no way be put in doubt.
This is something which he is supremely equipped to do. His self-assurance and physical impact were as potent as ever. The lady television commentator describing his arrival in Mexico City was soon talking of this 'manly Pope' and of his human warmth as 'sensational'. His success with the crowds was complete. He met the President, who apparently addressed him as 'sir', before setting off on a tour of his own.
His second aim was to give a lead to the deliberations of the conference, a task which needed much more than manliness and presence. The Latin American Epis copal Council was founded in 1955, but its most famous meeting was held exactly ten years ago at Medellin. There the decision was taken to place the Latin American Church firmly on the path of social justice. Other decisions were made at that conference, but it is remembered for having pledged the Latin American Church to a progressive future, against tyranny and exploitation. Arguably, the cause of social justice at Medellin has been given too much prominence, or was too heavily emphasised because 1968 was a year when left-wing causes seemed to be prospering. These arguments were revived this week by Cardinal Baggio who has been sent by the Pope from the Vatican to preside over the Puebla conference. But the fact remains that Medellin is looked on as a turning point in the Church's attitude, an encouragement to progressive forces and of an outlook able to accommodate the liberation theories and Marxist borrowings which accompanied — and still do — the Church's new outlook.
The Pope's answer to doubts and divisions was simple. In a speech opening the conference, he called for unity from the outset on a Catholic approach independent of all ideologies. It is still hard to judge with this Pope how far he still sees the world as an extension of the Polish situation. It is either courageous or an oversimplification to call on this conference to 'begin your work in a climate of brotherly unity'. They are meeting until the middle of next month, and many of them are looking forward to some fundamental debate on the future of the Catholic Church in Latin America. And if any of them have forgotten the issue of liberation theology, a rival meeting in the city made up mainly of fifty priests and members of religious orders is insisting on liberation as the proper outlook of the Church which, they claim, is shared by the oppressed masses.
Much of the Pope's total rejection of this outlook is contained in his reading of Christ's personality and message. He would not accept claims showing 'Jesus as politically committed, as one who fought against Roman oppression and the authorities, and also as one involved in the class struggle. The subversive man from Nazareth, does not tally with the Church's cathechesis.'
He goes on: 'By confusing the insidious pretexts of Jesus's 'accusers.with the — very different — attitude of Jesus himself, some people adduce as the cause Of his death the outcome of a political conflict, and nothing is said of the Lord's will to deliver himself and of his conciousness of his redemptive mission. The Gospels clearly show that for Jesus anything that would alter his mission as the servant of Yahweh was a temptation. He does not accept the position of those who mixed the things of God with merely political attitudes. He unequivocally rejects recourse to violence. He opens his message of conversion to everybody without excluding even the publicans. The perspective of his mission is much deeper. It consists in complete salvation through transforming, peacemaking, pardoning, and reconciling love'.
He placed the final nail in the cause of what are regarded as the progressive elements in the Latin American Church with a reminder of the dictum of his shortlived predecessor, John Paul I, who said that it was wrong to state that political, economic and social liberation coincided with salvation in Jesus Christ, 'that the RegnumDei is identified with the Regnum Hominis.
The Pope's third point can be very briefly made, because it is inherent in the other two. He has once again shown the massive weight he attaches to the papal office. This is increasingly becoming the hallmark of the reign. To the Latin American bishops, he expressed it as part of his concept of unity in these terms: 'It is unity around the gospel and Peter living in his successor, all of which are different signs, but all of them, highly important signs, of the presence of Jesus among us.' It would be difficult to set the papal claims higher than that.
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