A Pope for nearly all seasons

Murray Sayle

Tokyo It was hot in the Philippines, weather and welcome. Crowds of up to three million massed under the banana and palm trees of eight cities to yellifiva el PapaPand, just as often (after half a century of public education in English), 'Long Live his Holiness!' Everywhere John Paul II was greeted by hoarse multitudes, invariably including Mrs Imelda Marcos, wife of President Fernando Marcos, who stuck to the Pope like his noonday shadow in the evident hope that some of the Pontiff's popularity would rub Off on her husband's increasingly irksome 15-year-old dictatorship.

The Philippines are nearly four-fifths Catholic, so the Pope was preaching to the converted with his stern condemnation of divorce, abortion and artificial contraception. Five years ago, the Filipino birth rate was 41 per 1000 per year, one of the highest in the world, a tropical downpour of infants Which swamps schools and job opportunities and compels Filipina girls to go acharring the world over, from Hong Kong to Huddersfield, while the young men waste their lives in rebellious idleness.

Much joy as they no doubt bring their parents, the social consequences of all these Children indisputably include unemployment, violent crime and motherless families. (Many of those cheerful Filipina maids hide the anguish of leaving husband and babies at home, there being no other way of feeding them.) By energetic efforts the Marcos regime has managed to get the birth rate down to 31.8 per 1000 last year, Still far too high. Even to stay level economically, the Philippines would need an annual GNP growth of something close to 15 per cent, impossible on this earth, and especially as the schools are swamped, unemployment is high, and so on. The classic vicious circle, in short, of poverty. The methods used to get the Filipino birth rate even this far down include exhortation, a government publicity campaign, economic incentives and disincentives, cheap condoms, pills and vasectomies: In such a staunchly Catholic country, Officially sanctioned abortions are out. But even so the Marcos programme would seem to involve 'artificial contraception' in some or other form roundly condemned by the PnPe. 'Responsible parenthood', His Holmess's answer to one of Asia's most Pressing problems, seems a reasonable plan, but how to achieve it? An answer, of a sort, may well be in Japan. As the Pope flew north, an Arctic blizzard descended from Siberia, bringing the coldest spell for 16 years. Less than one per cent of Japanese are Christians, and quite apart from the weather, Japan's' welcome was one of respectful curiosity rather than rapture, rather as if John Paul was the head of a big foreign business corporation, here to propose an interesting merger. His title, even, was a problem. The Japanese media finally settled. on Ho-o Paulo Nisei, which translates as 'King of religion second generation Paul', to which the faithful added a pOlite `banzair . Japanese know, of course, that the papacy does not in principle normally descen& de pere en fils, but the concept of inheriting a craft or office in a spiritual way is well established and the 'second generation' style comes from the usage of actors in the kabuki theatre. But which faith does King Paul rule? 'Who is the Pope of the Protestant religion?' a Japanese colleague asked me, and when I explained that this currently was being contested between Belfast, Canterbury and other sacred cities, he looked blank.

Tokyo, all grey cubes of concrete, did indeed have a Presbyterian feel the day the Pope arrived, and driving rain turned into sleet and then freezing slush. The Pope is, however, a man of the north himself, and he wore no more than his normal white canonicals and floppy burnt-orange hat to make his first official call, on Emperor Hirohito.

This was, the Pope said, the first time he had ever set foot in a royal palace, but the visit was more memorable than that. The incumbent of the world's oldest elective office met, by appointment, the holder of the world's oldest hereditary job. Broadshouldered, shrewd of eye, with the beefy ungloved mitts of a man who has done his share of manual work, the Pope (hardly the Emperor, come to think of it, although he sometimes plants rice) brushed aside an umbrella to stride briskly through the drizzle into the palace, apparently keen to meet a senior colleague he had heard a lot about.

Emperor Hirohito, for his part, walked unaided down the long flight of steps into his reception hall, and continued out onto the palace porch to greet his guest. As the former head of a religion himself, of which he was once the principal deity as well, the Emperor has reigned an eventful 55 years and does not need a meeting with the Pope to build up his image in Japan — quite the reverse. However, Hirohito, too, was clearly glad of a change from run-of-the-mill presidents and prime ministers. The pair were soon deep in animated conversation in a mixture of English, French and Japanese (the Pope manfully trying the Japanese.) They ignored the loudspeakers, bellowing in the distance, of Japanese right-wingers yelling the Japanese equivalent of 'Pope out!' and 'Asia rules OK'?' but urbanely acceded to appeals from the massed photographers for `Just one more, Pope'. A friendly encounter, more than merely formal, and surely worthy of a plaque like the one in the Midlands Hotel in Manchester where Rolls met Royce.

After calling on the Emperor the Pope went on television, answering prepared question from young people in slow, but clearly intelligible Japanese. At least, I could understand him, which may be a bad sign, but Japanese friends tell me he came over well and made a favourable impression, not as a patronising Westerner but a man who felt that the East had something to teach, as well as to learn. Under his television image, as he spoke, was a sign in English reading Pope Is Hope, which happens to be a brand of cigarettes put up by the Japan Tobacco, Salt and Alcohol State Monopoly. (Hope, not Pope.) The burden of the papal message, clearly deeply felt, was an appeal for peace, which happens to be another brand of Japanese cigarettes.

Coincidence, we may be sure, rather than brazen subliminal advertising, but not without significance, If only the rest of the world shared Japan's present low level of armaments and distaste for war, we could all look forward to a king-sized Peace with unfiltered Hope.

But praising peace and pointing to the horrors of nuclear war are not exactly new for Japanese. 'We have heard these appeals many times before', the Yomiuri Shimbun commented wistfully, 'but no one seems to listen'. Indeed, as the Pope spoke, more than a million times the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb was being stacked into silos or winched into the bays of bombers, and it seems only reasonable to expect that some day, somewhere, one of them is going to go off. Is Christianity any kind of a nuclear deterrent?

Ever since the Founder advised a Roman centurion that there was no Divine objection to giving Caesar the things that belong to the state, such as military service, Christians have wrestled with the problem of war without much success. The Churches may have done something to soften its worst horrors, but not much to prevent them. An unarmed pacifist state would not last long if it had borders, or even sea-lanes, and the Christian soldier seems to have appeared in history arm-in-arm with the Christian cleric.

Once the concept of a just war is admitted, the views of clergymen on which weapons are humane tend to take second place to the calculations of soldiers on which are likely to win. Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, the last important American to visit Hiroshima, was badly received when she refused to say that under no circumstances was it morally right to make or use nuclear weapons — because what do you do if you are attacked with them, or threatened with them, or have reason to fear you might be? Is the argument that the balance of terror is now preserving a precarious peace without any merit? Japan's position, as a privileged ally of the foremost nuclear power, the US, is at best having things shiftily both ways.

The Pope, a compassionate man, was clearly deeply moved by what he saw in the museum in Hiroshima, as the museum's sponsors intended. He did not, however, address himself to the real difficulties of the nuclear problem. Every time a promising new weapon has been introduced, Christian clerics have gone on the moral rack ('square bullets for Turks', ruled one, 'round for Christians"). We eventually standardised on the round because they kill better. Now bullets are being promoted as the kinder alternative to atom bombs. Meanwhile, any minute, Peace may go up in smoke, and us with it.

The most enthusiastic crowds of his Japanese tour greeted Second Generation Paul in Nagasaki, cradle of Japanese Christianity and victim of the second atomic bomb. They were also the hardiest of a tough race, hearing the Pope say a threehour mass in an open-air sports stadium so cold that nine communicants broke bones slipping on ice and 466 were treated for exposure.

Praising the 26 martyrs crucified in Nagasaki on the orders, of anti-Christian Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, Pope John Paul was clearly on a subject close to his heart. His own ministry has, after all, been entirely in a country ruled by selfproclaimed atheists, and while Poland is not exactly partes infideles, this Pope can certainly be considered an expert on the propagation of the faith in a hostile climate. He did not, however, beyond condemning 'materialism', get into moral issues, and those who hoped to hear John Paul's sermon against divorce, artificial contraception, pre-marital sex, abortion and homosexuality froze in vain.

This may have shown discretion on the Pontiff s part, on the calculation that the 99.6 per cent of Japanese who are not, Catholics might not have welcomed advice on their morals from a foreign clergyman, no matter how eminent. The need, however, would seem to be there, judging by last week's announcement that the Japanese birth-rate in 1980 was 13.7 per 1,000, the smallest ever, and one of the lowest in the world. The average Japanese family now has 1.7 children, below replacement rate, and Japanese officialdom is beginning to worry that the country may be running out of its only natural resource, Japanese.

The reasons are not far to seek. To raise a child from the cradle through university, nowadays essential for a secure salaried job, costs a Japanese family £30,000 on the 'cheap' track, all school fees are paid by the state, and £64,000 by the more reliable path of private education. The dearest housing and food in the world, the socially-dictated need to keep up with the Suzukis in colour televisions, washing machines and hi-fi sets, the cost of school all conspire to swell the Japanese GNP and puncture the prospect of parenthood.

It is avoided by the widespread use of condoms, available at all supermarket check-outs and from discreet ladies who call door-to-door, by a massive abortion rate, once two million a year, half again as numerous as births, and still running at more than 600,000 a year, IUD's which are widely prescribed by Japanese doctors (the pill is under official disfavour, allegedly because of the fear of long-term sideeffects) and by abstinence, Japanese-style. This consists of husbands spending night after night out drinking sake and whisky with the boys from the office, and often dallying with bar hostesses as well, while the wives stay home and watch telly. Not surprisingly, last year's divorce rate was also the highest in Japanese history.

We might, at this point attempt a reckoning of what the Pope achieved on his Asian tour, beyond energetically showing the tiara flag under palm, pine and pineapple. To begin with, the negatives. It is doubtful that he braked the nuclear arms race by a single megaton, and the hard men of the Pentagon and Kremlin no doubt added his appeal for disarmament to the circular filing cabinet. Parish priests fighting the lonely battle of the confessional in Asian societies desperate to get into the industrial system, like the Philippines, or paying the price for getting in too fast, like Japan, have not had much practical guidance, either.

However, in an area where the Pope indisputably has first-hand experience, namely the minefield of church-state relations with Communist countries, he may well have made progress while he was out East. In Manila he told a well-publicised gathering, apparently out of the blue, that he sent 'affectionate greetings' to his 'brothers and sisters of the Church in China', and that he was longing to see them, 'either to strengthen you by sharing a spiritual gift, or, what is better, to find encouragement among you from our common Faith'. He added that he saw 'no incompatibility in being truly Christian and authentically Chinese'. The message here was clearly addressed to the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which broke away from Rome on the orders of the Chinese Communist government immediately after the revolution, when there were between four and six million Catholics scattered through China. During the long night of the Cultural Revolution the Chinese Church all but disappeared, and only in recent years has one Patriotic Catholic church reopened in Peking. The celebrant in charge has been one Bishop Fu, a member of the CPCA, whose consecration has never been reported in due form to Rome, and whose succession from the apostle is therefore, to put it mildly, in some doubt. Fairly Reverend Fu has, however, managed to say Mass in Latin every Sunday, under considerable difficulties, and has a steady congregation of foreign diplomats and a few elderly Chinese (the diplomats know that he is out of communion with Rome but want to encourage him anyway). The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, a sort of Haig in purple, added gnostically that, 'it cannot be ruled out that something that is illegitimate can be made legitimate'. This can only be an invitation to negotiate a new beginning, and Reverend Fu at first indicated interest, but then warned surlily, in the manner of Martin Luther and Henry VIII, that he Would not accept any `paternalistic subordination'. Cardinal Casaroli then left the Papal party to fly to Hong Kong and confer With the Jesuit Bishop Dominic Tang Yiming who was released from prison last Year after serving 30 years on charges of being an agent of Western imperialism — exactly the same accusation, as it happens, that Shogun Tokugawa levelled at the martyrs of Nagasaki nearly four centuries earlier.

Bishop Tang is the only Chinese bishop recognised by both the Vatican and the CPCA and is therefore in a position to play a key role in any accommodation between Rome and Peking. Of course there is always the problem of Taiwan, where the Vatican maintains a Charge d'affaires accredited to `the Republic of China'. To derecognise a country with a Christian premier (Chiang Ching-Kuo, the Gimo's son, is a Methodist), even if it is a breakaway province, in order to recognise a Communist government is a square bullet for any Pope to bite on, but as Cardinal Casaroli said in Hong Kong, `In the diplomatic life there are many, many ways for studying and solving questions'. An agreement which gave the Peking regime a veto on higher appointments in a Chinese Church reunited with Rome would probably be an essential condition. John Paul is believed to have already negotiated such a modus vivendi with the authorities in Warsaw.

So, summing up, His Lordship Second Generation Paul seems to have done the Church no harm, and probably a gfeat deal of good in his progress through the Orient. He may have shied away from some of the highest hurdles, but then, like the rest of us, he's human, and nobody's perfect. Not even the Emperor of Japan.