Keys of This Blood (31 page)

Worse still, the West is so deeply committed to the brand of development that constantly produces such by-products of suffering, that even when Third World nations at least try to attain some degree of modern development of their own, John Paul sees their way constantly obstructed, and their efforts consistently hampered by the same moral deficiency shared for so long by East and West.

In Helsinki in May of 1989, for example, representatives of eighty countries gathered at an international forum aimed at countering the problem of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals eating away at the earth's ozone shield. The developing nations present pointed out that they could not develop environmentally sound alternatives by the year 2000 as the target date and at the same time maintain even their present slow pace of national development. The developed countries present balked, however, at demands by some that, for the benefit of all, an international pool of money be established to enable the poorer nations to include this critical factor in their already troubled and overburdened national agendas.

In its successful moral domination of the West nations, the East has been aided mightily by something more than its ability to lure its adversary onto its own terrain in the struggle for world domination. It was aided at least as much by the snowballing of what has accurately been called the “industry of blame.”

For over forty years, the rulers of the East nations explained away their total failure to provide their populations with a decent standard of living as the exclusive result of the machinations of West nations. As part and parcel of the Big Lie that the Eastern satellite nations were sovereign states happy in their bondage, and that Marxist totalitarianism is democracy perfected, this industry of blame was foisted on East and
South alike. Anything bad in those regions—any ill fortune, including natural catastrophes—was blamed on the devilish doings of the West. Perhaps the most ludicrous and evil-minded recent example was the idea launched by the KGB that the West had deliberately scattered toxic material abroad in order to create the AIDS epidemic, first in Africa and then in the countries of the “socialist fraternity.”

Just how successful the East has consistently been in its domination of this industry of blame can be seen in the degree to which many, both individuals and organizations within the West, have bought into the Soviet arguments. In what one American politician aptly named the “blame-America-first” syndrome, representative segments of the world of the West have steadily widened the scope of “freedom of expression” to include a moral distortion of the first order. Freewheeling agencies of democracies in Europe and North America have joined with increasing energy in corroding the self-knowledge of the peoples of the West nations. Every channel in the powerful communications industry has become implicated in the destruction of moral accuracy of judgment.

Thus, the West has not merely been persuaded, it has joined in persuading itself, that all our communal ills—environmental, civil, political, religious—are of its own doing.

So widespread has Pope John Paul found this attitude to be by now that he frequently encounters it as the dominant and motivating “belief system” among many of his own bishops, priests and religious in the West nations, as well as among the authorities in other churches. The United States, as the leader of the West nations, is accepted as the archvillain of international life.

However, just as John Paul roundly rejects the principles of balance and containment as the bastard children of the principle of moral equivalence, so he rejects the industry of blame as yet another bastard child of the Big Lie.

Pope John Paul II insists, as the Church always insists, that in any moral appraisal of East and West for the existence and maintenance of sinful structures, there must be a just distribution of responsibility. And he insists that this is both possible and necessary because, as he is ever mindful, sinful structures never just pop up like mushrooms in a damp forest. They are always and only brought into being and nurtured into systematic power by dedicated groups of men and women who have a goal in mind.

In this regard, in fact, the Pontiff makes an important distinction. He stresses the fact that in neither bloc of nations, East or West, did the populations at large have anything effective to say or do about the institutionalization
of sinful structures in their midst. In East and West alike, it was the chief protagonists of the
systems
who were coresponsible.

It is John Paul's considered opinion and principle of action and reaction that, above all today, at the opening of the nineties, when most of the captive nations of the East are shaking off the chains that bound them so helplessly to the USSR, a moral appraisal of the nations' behavior over the past forty years is a required prelude to any sound consideration of what must now be the principle of behavior as regards both those formerly captive nations and their captor, the USSR. It will not do to deceive oneself and say that “the West has waited patiently for this [the revolt of the satellites] to take place. Our policy of containment paid off!”

Papa Wojtyla's appraisal of those North-South, East-West coordinates appears in three main judgments comprehensively answering the query: Who has been morally responsible for the creation and maintenance of those two crippling coordinates of world crisis?

As regards the North-South coordinate, he pronounced a very solemn judgment when speaking in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso (the former Upper Volta), in West Africa: “The earth is becoming sterile across an immense area, malnutrition is chronic for tens of millions of people, too many children die. Is it possible that such a need is not felt by all humanity? … Shouldn't the ‘developed' societies ask themselves what model they present to the rest of the world, about the needs they [the developed societies] have created, and even about the origin of the riches that have become necessary for them?” The “developed” world (the North) has treated Third World nations “as clients and as debtors who are more or less solvent,” but “that attitude, whether conscious or not, has already led to too many dead ends.”

The remedy? One must imagine that lone white-robed figure standing on the wasting fringes of the deadly blowing sands of the Sahel, crying obstinately and authoritatively over a sea of black imploring faces in an effort to reach the ears of Europe, the United States, Japan, the “Asian Tigers,” and the USSR, “In the name of justice, the Bishop of Rome, the successor to Peter, begs his brothers and sisters around the world not to scorn the hungry of this continent [Africa], not to deny them the universal right to human dignity and the security of life.”

Only the Bishop of Rome, only the one man holding the Keys of divine authority guaranteed by the human blood of God made man, could even venture to brandish them in that Ouagadougou—in all the miserable Ouagadougous of the South nations.

As for the East-West coordinate of opposition and mistrust and human
waste, John Paul's moral judgment can be sought in his addresses, speeches, sermons and conversations during the months of 1989 and into 1990, when the “Gorbachevist” liberation movement started.

There is no doubt in Papa Wojtyla's mind that the creation and maintenance of the Gulag empire was the work of those dedicated to establishing the Leninist “proletarian revolution” worldwide. But, entwined with that primary moral responsibility of the USSR and of all the USSR's surrogates, supporters, clients, fellow travelers, “moles” and “frontmen,” there is the secondary responsibility of the capitalist West, which from the beginning and for the whole of the Leninist lifetime connived at the perpetuation of that evil system just because the West concluded that its peace, security and profits lay along that way.

John Paul's third moral judgment concerns the distribution of moral responsibility for the successful and godly conduct of the new phase of East-West relationships opened up by the dawn of Gorbachevism in the USSR and Eastern Europe.

Again, the prime moral responsibility lies on the shoulders of the Party-State: the men who ran it—the
nomenklatura
—as well as their surrogates and supporters outside the USSR. But secondary and by no means less important is the responsibility of the West. Having connived, with the Kennan doctrine of containment as the umbrella principle of action, with the “evil empire,” for so long and with such dire human consequences, the West now has a moral obligation to give of itself in order to heal the grievous wound inflicted on so many millions of humanity during the lifetime of more than two generations.

Here, Papa Wojtyla tries to point out the nature of that deep wound. There is now a common illusion in the West that freedom has broken out in all the former Soviet satellites, and that with that democratic freedom will come not only democratic egalitarianism but all the virtues entertained—at least originally—by the proponents of freedom. But this is mere illusion.

The human devastation in the former members of the Gulag system lies far deeper than can be reached by a supply of dishwashers, VCRs, bank accounts, luxury foods, convenience goods, plentiful necessities, free media, free elections. The populations of those former satellites have no ideology, no set of moral principles, no ethic, no goals—other than an immediate and full participation in the “good life” as they have longingly seen it presented by Western media: the rip-roaring hedonism of J.R. in “Dallas,” the meteoric acquisitions of huge dollar fortunes by Western entrepreneurs, the limitless stretches of sexuality as propounded in the flourishing pornography establishment of the West, and the politics of no higher authority than the demands of each human self.

This, as many sociologists in Europe are already beginning to remark, is a movement in those East populations that should be labeled the “no-idea movement.” It is a violent reaching out for the objective—the good life—without any guiding credo, without any ideology worthy of those who ostensibly are fleeing the crass materialism and amoral godlessness of the Gulag.

Of course, as John Paul points out, each man and woman in the Gulag will answer to God for their individual actions. But over and above their individual responsibilities, they have been unwilling victims of the sinful structures at which the West connived for so long.

The West therefore has incurred a moral responsibility for a holistic healing of that deep communal wound; and, for that healing, not merely a flood of dollars and an array of joint ventures will suffice. There has to be a healing of minds, a curing of the soul's disease. John Paul is insistent: Europe—the “new Europe” eyed by East and West—“can only be built on the spiritual principles that originally made Europe possible,” he told visiting “Europeans” at the end of January 1990.

In facing the changes now taking place throughout the Gulag archipelago, the West and Pope John Paul differ profoundly in the interpretation of what those changes forebode.

The general feeling abroad in the West is that the “Cold War” has ended, that Communism is bankrupt and that the changes are irreversible, even if Mikhail Gorbachev is swept aside by the internal ills of the USSR. At its most morally perceptive, this general feeling in the West glories—and rightly so—in the apparent triumph of democratic ideas, the departure of those Stalinist relics—Todor Zhivkov from Bulgaria, Erich Honecker from East Germany, János Kádár from Hungary, Milos Jakes from Czechoslovakia, Wojciech Jaruzelski from Poland.

These new initiatives apart, we are now recording a widespread impression or conviction reflected in public commentaries, by columnists, in the words of statesmen and the manifestos and declarations of particular groups—cultic, humanistic, philosophic, even religious. It is, to phrase it in ordinary words, that some important change is taking place. But further precisions are hard to come by; and many who probe the matter, seeking some further precision, end up with a rosy-hued optimism or in dithering doubt.

The impression or conviction in this matter is very fragile and volatile, just like our perception of sunlight in the autumn. Watching the sun's reflection in a frequented room, in early fall, your awareness is caught by a subtle change in the light. It is ever so slight. But it is there. You
marvel at it because it seems so slight. Yet it has a clarity unnoticed for some time. Then doubt sets in: Is it because something is changing in you—a new clarity in certain matters, a shift brought about by external events and your own inner development? Or is it a change in the quality of the light that produces a change in you? For we, with all other things in our cosmos, do change. So, finally, when all is said about these changes, does a severe doubt amounting to an anxiety hover in the minds of Western onlookers of the chaotic scene.

What, in other words, people in the West are asking, is happening in this era of Gorbachevism's first impact? Is there a big change under way in the society of nations (the USSR included)? Or is it all a trick of our autumn sunlight, an illusion, therefore, a darkening of our vision? Has the society of nations been taken unconsciously captive by someone who may be the prime master in the exquisite art of political illusion on a grand scale?

There is no such doubt running through the Roman Catholic papacy and its reading of events: from Pius XI through Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, up to the present holder of the Petrine Keys of authoritative teaching about the good and the bad in human affairs. Even a John XXIII, who made the first papal overtures to the USSR and was betrayed in his trust, and a Paul VI, who was totally outclassed in this confused arena of East-West relations—even they faithfully transmitted the unchanging judgment of the Roman Catholic papacy.

That is: Nothing short of a religious and moral conversion of the people of the USSR, accompanied by a similar change in the West, will solve the ever-intensifying geopolitical crisis, and allow the fierce millennium endgame to result in a peace that can be accurately called human—precisely because it will have a divine blessing.