Keys of This Blood (48 page)

For John Paul, the pathos of their position is accentuated by the fact that these groups are heirs to an ancient tradition that today avails them not. Within that tradition, they have an instinct for the georeligious and, therefore, for the geopolitical. But the passage of time and the development of circumstances exclude them from that georeligious and geopolitical stance they feel in their bones as part of their heritage, part of their mandate and part of their reason for existence as religious groups.

Because they climbed into their positions by breaking with the Roman papacy and so abandoned their only realistic hope of georeligious status, John Paul looks upon them with a special solicitude. But he knows that as they now stand, their future lies down one of two pathways. Either they will remain lodged in relative isolation in their historical crevasses, holding on to their traditions. Or, as some of them have already shown an inclination to do, they will decide to accept some form of merger with the various tides advancing on their positions. Beyond that, any final and satisfactory relief of their pathos must await near-future historical events of a worldwide magnitude.

In the meantime, because of their past they exercise a certain political influence of a localized nature, with which John Paul must reckon. The Russian Orthodox Church centered in the Patriarchate of Moscow not only wields considerable influence over some 100 million members; it also becomes the consenting, if unwilling, handmaiden of the Soviet Party-State. Its major officials accepted positions in the KGB. Its authorities acquiesced in the massacre of thousands of Roman Catholic clergy, and accepted—as spoils of war—many Roman Catholic churches and institutions. Indeed, today, at least one solid faction in the Patriarchal Church is virulently antipapal. Throughout the remaining branches of Eastern Orthodoxy there persists a deeply buried antipapal and anti-Roman prejudice; it is felt that any aggrandizement of the papacy can come only at the cost of Orthodox dignity and privilege.

For Greek Orthodoxy, centered historically in Constantinople, always claimed that this city (now Istanbul of the Turks) was the Second Rome replacing the First Rome (of the Popes); and Russian Orthodoxy, in its long-distant high days of preeminence, claimed that Moscow was the Third (and Final) Rome, replacing that Second Rome and that First Rome. History has not been kind to either of these delusions of religious grandeur. Yet, in both centers and patriarchates, those claims are still
regnant and are the bases of the opposition and enmity John Paul has to deal with from them. Georeligiously, of course, they are not competitors of his. But globally, they oppose him.

The fourth Provincial Globalist situation room holds the special fascination of primitive things. For here is displayed a rendition of the world map that has been suited as well as can be managed to the mind and the outlook of four ancient but still subsistent non-Christian religions: animism, Shintoism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Each of these groups would claim that it possesses a religious outlook that
could be
georeligious and that it is therefore potentially geopolitical. In John Paul's view, they do have explanations of man's cosmos that would be georeligious, had the nations of the world ceased to develop about three thousand years ago. That did not happen, however. And in today's world, all four groups are at bay and threatened by the encroaching tides of modernism.

Yet they have to be counted by John Paul as a very important assemblage of globalists for the simple reason of their numbers. Between the subcontinent of India, a large proportion of Chinese, and a majority of Southeast Asians, there is a number somewhere in the region of 1.5 to 2 billion human beings involved here. Precisely among this vast population, the wheels of development have begun to churn faster and faster, producing the new “Asian Tigers” (Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand) and promising to accelerate such technotronic development elsewhere throughout the landmass of Asia. Papa Wojtyla can be sure that with that development there will be a fresh development of globalism, always at least tinged if not deeply colored by the original religious and ethical outlook of those peoples. When the time comes that a geopolitical perspective enters their angle of vision, he can envisage an opposition from them to his own geopolitical undertaking.

Already, in the religiously jaded and ethically confused West, there has filtered from Buddhism, and to a lesser degree from Hinduism and animism, a new current of religiosity—belief and cult—which produces minds diametrically opposed to the Christianity John Paul professes and on which his geopolitics is founded.

All of the planning materials open to the Pontiffs view in the fifth situation room reflect real strife, deep contradictions between the globalist groups gathered here and between each of these groups and the wide world with which they are in constant and intense interaction.

For one or more of a variety of reasons, each of these groups maintains an “apartness” from the rest of the world, without standing aside from the world. Each wants to be part of that world, for each must have a globalist influence to achieve its own aims. The anomaly, of course, is that “apartness” is the tie that classifies these groups together in the Pontiffs global analysis of each of them.

The “apartness” involved here can take various forms, depending on the mind-set of each group. But it is most often based upon an established group tradition—usually religious or ethical or cultural but most times riven of necessity with economic and political dimensions.

While the extremism of such “apartness” has resulted in the apartheid system of the Republic of South Africa, fundamentally the same sense of “apartness” is shared by many white nations vis-à-vis the nonwhite nations, by many black nations of Africa, and many yellow nations vis-à-vis those differing ethnically from them. A similar apartness, but marked by a long-standing cultural tradition, is to be found in the people of the Indian subcontinent and of Japan. An identical type of “apartness” strengthened by powerful cultural factors gave rise to the distinction made by the ancient Greeks between themselves and all non-Greeks, whom they called “barbarians.”

Just as the traditional name for China, the Middle Kingdom, indicated how its inhabitants held to the centrality of that country in the world and its “apartness” as the center of the world, so every group known to us as having this sense of special “apartness” from the rest of human society has its own way of looking at the map of countries and nations.

Whatever practical form “apartness” may take in any individual group, and whatever its basis, it is regarded by each group in this situation room as a basic given of its identity. It is lodged deeply in the lives, outlooks and folkways of its participants.

The “apartness” of these groups does not necessarily prompt all of them to seek a territorial integrity for themselves. But there is always a certain limit to the assimilation they will accept. And the ongoing affairs of human society are judged as favorable or inimical according as those affairs impact on the delicate balance each group maintains between the “apartness” it sees as essential to its identity and the interaction with the world essential to its vibrancy and its practical success.

The outstanding groups located in this fifth situation room, Japanese, Chinese and Jews, exhibit the fundamental mark of that genuine apartness which marks them Provincial Globalists. This is the absence of any formal element in them that would drive them to “convert” the world to their own way of life. In fact, as is generally known and acknowledged, a
hallmark in all three indicates that they do not want to do so; indeed, that they consider it impossible. No non-Japanese or non-Chinese can really become Japanese or Chinese, even to the extent that men and women of different nations—including Chinese and Japanese—have become, say, thoroughgoing Americans or Frenchmen. It is axiomatic in Judaism that while anyone can and is allowed to convert to Judaism, Jewishness is restricted to those born of a Jewish mother.

In other words, whatever may happen to their members, singly taken, who may be absorbed into non-Japanese, non-Chinese or non-Jewish societies, for the bulk of the populations living in China, Japan and Israel, assimilation—loss of that apartness—is positively excluded. The special problems faced by these Provincial Globalists are best exemplified in the case of Jews.

Jews will assign a preeminence to the Land of Israel, even though they have no intention of living there, and to the Americas, where nearly half of the world Jewish population (fifteen million) live today. This self-consciousness and apartness of Jews has been set in ferroconcrete by the never-to-be-forgotten Hitlerian attempt at total genocide. For that Holocaust and the birth of Israel have, as Bruno Bettelheim pointed out, forever liquidated the old ghetto mentality of Jews. Jews will no longer seek out that type of segregation they once did when they petitioned Christian authorities to set aside a small portion (a
borghetto
) of the city (the
borgo
) for their exclusive use. But in no way is this exit from the ghetto mentality to be taken as a desire for assimilation. “Nonsegregation without assimilation, this is the new rule.”

For John Paul, all three of these “apartness” groups are very important because all three have and will have important roles to play in building the geopolitical structure of the new world order. And each group presents different problems and will meet different difficulties. For, in a profound sense, their strengths derive in large part from their apartness. But once their globalism begins to face the transition to a geopolitical viewpoint, the first casualty will be that apartness.

The Provincial Globalists of our age are destined to undergo a series of severe shocks and mutations as, willy-nilly, they adapt themselves to the new globalism emanating from more powerful groups. There is no way that any one of them will be able to maintain itself in any vibrancy and progressive strength unless it allows—or suffers—its provincialism to be enlarged beyond the confines it traditionally observed. Individuals among them may for a while maintain themselves within those confines.
But, inevitably, as groups they will have to face dire alternatives. Either they will become thoroughly and realistically globalized and therefore capable of collaborating in the building of a geopolitical structure. Or, as groups, they will remain in place, diminish in numbers and influence, and finally lose their identity as operative parts in a new world order.

John Paul, in his papal travels, has constantly engaged in dialogue with representatives of these groups. In many cases, through the diplomatic arm of his Vatican, he maintains a relationship with them—at least a certain cordiality, sometimes even a mutual collaboration concerning some practical problem or need. He sees their individuality as a valuable asset in a world that tends to organize human beings into a faceless mass of undifferentiated peoples. And he knows that what is best in these Provincial Globalists—their sense of dignity and mission—can be sublimated by the grace of Christ and thus become a potent element in the building of a genuinely God-blessed structure for all nations.

Within the second broad category of globalist-minded groups contending for supremacy in the millennium endgame, Pope John Paul counts just three entries—three groups of one-world-community builders: the Humanists, the Mega-Religionists and the New Agers.

Unlike the Provincial Globalists, none of the groups involved here has any thought of remaining aloof, or of waiting for the mountain of public opinion to move of its own accord, or of getting caught in some isolated crevass of history. All of these groups, in short, are global activists. Moreover, each has demonstrated from the outset that it appreciates the importance of transnational structures such as the Pope's worldwide Church and Gorbachev's global machine. Each has a structure of its own, in fact. But the true genius of each group, operationally speaking,
lies in the fact that it has developed to a high art the ability to ride piggyback on the structural setups of everyone else's organization, whispering sweet universalisms into the ears of their leaders and adherents alike.

It is common knowledge that each of these groups has attracted its share of crackpot visionaries: so much so that the groups themselves are frequently lampooned. But the truth is that the membership in each case is weighty with the names of many highly valued men and women. And even a glance at the strides each group has made toward its own vision of a one-world community is enough to convince any observer that, as a whole, they cannot be dismissed as of no consequence.

The globalist groups within these three categories are strikingly compatible with one another. Indeed, compatibility is a basic watchword for all of them; and it rests primarily on two things.

First, though their ideas about the world differ somewhat, they are in agreement on certain bedrock issues—most especially those concerning the religions of the world, and those having to do with the desirability of a global community. Second, both in their ideas and in their strategies for acting in relation to the world, all of these groups are remarkably well suited to the already generally accepted aims of interdependence and material development among all the nations and cultures.

The similarities among these three groups are so striking, in fact, that John Paul sees them in the long run of historical evolution as neither more nor less than three interfacing programs formed within and locked onto the same ground plan. Reason and imagination lead one to conclude that the ground plan emanated from one intelligence.

Common to the ideas of each of these globalist groups is the conviction that man is even more than the most important figure in the cosmos. For them, man is the only important figure. Each group vindicates the exclusively human.

To one degree or another, albeit with different shadings, each group shares the view that mankind is not called to be holy; it is called to be happy, in the certainty that all the glory of life is right here, and right now. Happiness lies within the ambit of material development. Each of us is called to be a happy consumer of the earth's goods, living in a bountiful world. That is our supremest right and our only common destiny.