Keys of This Blood (58 page)

We who have never lived within such a tightly centralized and vast collectivist system as Mazur was describing—that he was all but predicting, in fact—cannot even imagine its details as they would affect our daily lives. But John Paul does not need to imagine those effects.

He does not need to use his imagination because he lived much of his life in the very heart of just such an ideologically based system. Further, he does not need to use his imagination because, as the man who now sits at the governing center of the universal, age-old and deeply experienced Roman Catholic Church—and at the center of the world's oldest
chancery—John Paul is privy to the closest thing there is in practical terms to racial memory and wisdom. Besides, he has sources of knowledge and enlightenment denied to ordinary mortals. He is deeply aware of historical realities. And he is far more deeply aware of plans-in-the-making and of things to come than many a government or managerial body—newly born babes when compared to the Vatican in memory and experience—that is attempting to direct human affairs along the paths of evolutionary globalism.

And finally, Pope John Paul does not have to use his imagination, because the current thrust of international life itself persuades him that the scenario sketched by Paul Mazur is not beyond the capability and the cooperative efforts of the Internationalist and Transnationalist groups—however benign their intentions may be for the good of us all.

Certainly everybody would like to dismiss such a scenario as no more than hyperbole and speculation. John Paul himself would like nothing better. But by the admission of just about everybody concerned, the good of the nations already depends on what looks very much like a global economy; and Mazur's projection of one form that global economy could take must be considered in cold realism.

Ultimately, it becomes clear from the Pope's observations, analyses and projections that unless the sky falls, he expects not only that we will have a unified global economy, but that it will rest on something more than a true world trade zone. It will rest on carefully calibrated principles of homogenization, harmonization and balance among the nations. These principles are to be housed in a vast network of globally spread financial, industrial, commercial and cultural organizations, distinguished from one another but organized into a hierarchy of power according only to the magnitude of their operations.

All of the indicators point for John Paul to a system that finally could not tolerate any organization that would stand unremittingly against the most valued principles of that system itself. How much less, then, could such a system tolerate an organization that claims to be not merely independent of its control but endowed with the final word on the human worth of that globalist system itself. Indeed, by definition, such an organization would be regarded as the ultimate enemy of the system. And by definition, the Roman Catholic institution headed by Pope John Paul is precisely that organization.

Already and on many occasions, the Pope has made it clear that neither he nor his Church is going to be homogenized in those sectors of
human life where he claims to have a unique and absolute mandate from Heaven. In all phases of education, in all aspects of moral behavior, and in all questions about the ultimate truths undergirding the life and death of every human being, this man claims for his papal persona the right, the privilege, the duty and the due authority to stand as judge. None of the present factors or future implications of the Internationalist-Transnationalist ideal are outside that claim or exempt from that judgment.

Any attempts to manage the world supply of food by curtailing human births through new techniques are within his purview to judge. All plans to rid education of any genuine religious and moral content, or to substitute a rational ethic for what he considers to be the ethical laws revealed by God, he will reject and oppose.

Moreover, he will do all of this following norms he insists are revealed by God to him as God's vicar on earth, norms confided to his principal care—and, if necessary, to his sole and supreme diktat.

There is no doubt in John Paul's mind that the Internationalist-Transnationalist groups are Genuine Globalists, who must be considered on a different level from their Provincial and Piggyback counterparts. For if the general Internationalist-Transnationalist program were to be followed at least by the United States, a once-more-united Germany, and Japan, as the principal economic and financial powers among the nations today—and were those three to make no concessions to regionalism or to exclusivist nationalism or to rabid protectionism—then John Paul would envision more than merely another contender in the globalist arena.

He would envision a third genuinely geopolitical competitor in the world by the end of the second millennium. A competitor aiming at the creation of a mentality common to millions of human beings all over the globe, and at a managerial system able to assert itself as the prime factor that will condition and direct the form of the new society of nations—the global village. No doubt exists in John Paul's mind that by such a time there will be a fourth and redoubtable competitor, mainland China in the grip of the CP of China.

John Paul's rockbound certitude—deriving from his Catholic faith and from his personal endowment as the sole vicar of God among men—is that any human effort that is not ultimately based on the moral and religious teachings of Christ must ultimately fail.

The question, therefore, is whether the rare sound of the genuinely geopolitical footstep is to be heard in the globalist situation rooms of the Internationalist and Transnationalist groups. The question to be addressed is whether those two groups can create for themselves a position
that will place them in direct contention—contention of the ultimate kind—with the revitalized form of Leninist Marxism introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, and with Pope John Paul's own beleaguered Roman Catholicism. There will be no genuine geopolitical contention between Gorbachevism and the Chinese Leninists—only a jockeying for pride of place in the ultimate victory parade of Marxism.

Finally, the question at the back of all the others is whether other geopolitical events not remotely contemplated by Internationalists and Transnationalists, Soviet or Chinese Marxists, will come upon the society of nations before even such powerful globalists as these have time to create the brave new world of technocrat and economist and financial manager.

In the arena of the millennium endgame, John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev may be crowded around with ambitious globalists. But in the Pontiff's geopolitical reckoning, there are chiefly four regions in which the near-future society of nations will be fashioned: the United States, the Soviet Union, mainland China and Western Europe.

Within the populations of each of those regions, specific major forces are at work. And from the accelerating interplay of those forces, from region to region and back again, will come all of the main developments affecting the papacy embodied by John Paul, all of the developments affecting therefore the spiritual salvation he claims to represent for all mankind.

If Pope John Paul's consideration of the future involves such sweeping terms as “regions” and “forces,” it is not because of any papal indifference to single individuals—to their conditions of life, their needs, their rights, their hopes. The opposite is true, in fact. John Paul thinks and talks about regions, and about forces at work therein, on the same principle that stands behind his insistence that there are “sinful structures” underlying the rich man/poor man and the beggarman/thief relationships between the nations.

In other words, such terms signify realities for John Paul. They signify the very men, women and children he has seen all around the world, who are acting observably in a common manner. When he speaks of forces at work in regions, those terms embody the lives of individuals who behave in a concerted way, develop along common lines, move in the same general direction; and who do so now almost exclusively for economic, financial, political or demographic reasons, or for a combination of those reasons.

Like it or not, Pope John Paul has found that on the geopolitical level, there is no other way to encompass the huge flow of concrete circumstances that now affect our practical world and his Church within that world. There is no other way he can come to overall and practical policy judgments on the truly geopolitical plane.

And therefore there is no way to set out John Paul's point of view, to glimpse what he faces in the millennium endgame, or to explain his policy judgments, other than to understand the way he sees those four principal regions of the world and the forces that now operate throughout each of them.

John Paul's summary assessment of the regions involved has, in one sense, the smoothness of a mathematical equation. Because he has no ax to grind politically, economically or financially, the high emotions that generally surround those issues for other leaders are absent for him. But there is one constant in the Pope's equation, one all-important coefficient he prefixes to his assessment of these regional forces; and he does this with a certainty that is in itself beyond the reach of common emotions and the most lucid reasoning any man or group of men can perform.

In John Paul's perspective, those forces emanating from among the nations appear as the molding influences, the impersonal architects building a new structure to house the society of nations. John Paul knows: Whatever is being wrought by those forces has been already—and even before they set to work—assumed within a framework of salvation in the all-encompassing mind and the irresistible intention of God.

That factor, according to John Paul, stands prior to all human activity; and it will be the final determinant of how effective the human activity of men will be. It is not a surprising factor in a Roman Catholic pope. But it must be clearly understood.

It is not a vague and general belief that, no matter what men do, no matter what type of structure is put together by those human forces, God will go ahead and do what God wants. Believers often think and speak—and nonbelievers just as often understand believers like John Paul to be carrying on—as if God were the Ultimate Handyman called in by the Despairing Householder who, in his stupidity and cockiness, thought he could mend that leak in the roof but has ended up floating around his own house, now invaded by the destructive waters of a deluge. This is God as the Fixer of Bad Deals, the Lone Ranger reversing what looked like death and disaster, the Last-Resort Hero. But such is not the God of John Paul.

Nor must John Paul's persuasion be framed within the Tower of Babel scenario. Men decide to build the tower of their geopolitical dreams. Of course, it is all wrong, inspired by arrogance, reared by pride, a real challenge to God, an affront God cannot and will not suffer. So God, at the crucial moment, just as it seems men will succeed in their godless undertaking, will step in and by a unilateral action frustrate all they do, confound their plans, destroy their miserable efforts and scatter them as pygmies under the iron heels of infinitely superior strength. This is not how John Paul conceives the plan and intentions of the God he worships and serves. For he worships and trusts in a God of salvation who so loved the world and all men in it that God's own son died so that all men might live forever.

Whether anyone shares or repudiates John Paul's prime conviction, they must understand that conviction and the knowledge on which it is based. It is simply this: All that men under the impulse of these regional forces achieve—in the gross and in the smallest detail—has been foreseen and incorporated as working parts in God's plan of salvation. Not in spite of men's actions and achievements, but through them, God's ultimate will prevails.

Right enough, in John Paul's outlook about the present workings of men, there is one largely unnoticed element: his conviction that in our actual geopolitical situation, there will be—in John Paul's lifetime—a direct intervention by God in those four regions of the world, with Russia as its focal point and all other regions of man's earth profoundly affected by that focused intervention. But it will not be a Tower of Babel intervention, nor anything like a parting of the Red Sea waters to allow merely the Elect to escape terrible destruction. For John Paul's is a God of love, indeed, is Love itself at work. Intervention there will be. Apocalypse—clear revelation of how ultimate good and consummate evil are irreconcilable—there will be. But now and throughout all regional developments, that Love is working assiduously in order to bring the ongoing drama of human things to God's foregone conclusion.

For those who do not understand John Paul's vision and do not know his conviction, logically the general observations he makes about all four regions and the forces at work within them may be disconcerting—especially for those who are partisans of one or another of those forces. For in every case, the change John Paul emphasizes is fundamental. In some cases, there are changes he regards as catastrophic in their present effects on the lives of ordinary men, women and children.

In general terms, within the nations of all four regions, let it be said of
John Paul's observation that all the old truths that reigned supreme are being changed. In some cases, they are being liquidated. And all the old symbols—that common shorthand by which whole populations express and share those truths—are being changed and liquidated, too.

If ever there was a nation that lived by such shorthand symbols, it was the United States.

In America, military strength was a fact; but it was more. It was a symbol of power once unique to that country. But that power has now been distributed among others. In America, man-made democracy was a fact, but it was more. It was the ideal for freedomless people elsewhere. But democracy in the United States is undergoing huge strains. In city halls and statehouses, in the Capitol and the White House, and in all three branches of government—executive, legislative and judicial—realignments are being forced that are too profound to pass off as just another little shift in the system of checks and balances.