The Moral Pillar and the Moral Contortionist - 29 January 1999

When the Pope visits the United States it is a political event unlike any other - and, except in time of crisis, more consequential to American society at large than that of any foreign statesman.

When he visits France, Spain or any of the Hispanic countries of South and Central America - including the former Portuguese colony of Brazil - the effect is foregone. The vast crowds that greet him may need encouragement or inspiration but they don't need conversion. Ninety per cent of the population is already of the faith.

So you'll have noticed that rarely, if ever, in these overwhelmingly Catholic countries are there bands of protestors. They would have to be the rich - the people who live on a thin crust of wealth that covers an ocean of want, the very people the Pope never fails to denounce for their neglect of the millions who greet him, who are the poor.

The politicians too hasten to greet him and, true or false, pretend to a fervent belief in the Holy Father and the dictates of Rome until he's gone. But whenever he visits the United States he's visiting the oldest democracy and the largest and most powerful country with a weighty - that's to say politically influential - middle class population of Catholics.

In a population of 260 million, 60-odd million Catholics. Almost one in four Americans is a Catholic.

It's something northern Europeans make a habit of forgetting when they go on about the weirdness of the contradiction between America's pioneering liberal democratic tradition and its continuing civil war about abortion and the odd determination of so many, otherwise liberal, politicians to seek to reverse the famous Supreme Court ruling of 1974 that made abortion legal under certain conditions which are subject to amendment by each of the 50 states and are always changing.

Ask those strangely liberal politicians about the religious composition of their constituencies. Same point in wondering why the American government has such a tough time and sometimes fails to vote for any United Nations foreign assistance bill that contains money which might be used for family planning.

What makes the prospect of a Papal visit more threatening is the knowledge that policies that are an embarrassment to a democratic administration are going to be the very ones the Pope will praise. And sure enough, this time, the Pope went further than ever.

"Illegalise abortion," he cried. "Illegalise abortion everywhere in America."

Now notice "America" - this visit first to Mexico and then to Missouri was intended to be a symbolic announcement of a new Vatican policy, indeed an immense change or leap in Papal policy toward the United States, which is nothing less than regarding the United States not as the famous northern neighbour of the Central and Southern American countries but one of them.

This doctrine has brought the Pope a long way from his original mission which was to make the Roman Catholic Church of Eastern Europe the leader of a new world Catholic order.

He realised some time ago that, as one Catholic theologian put it: "European unity is now based on the euro rather than the spirit."

But last year, at this time, when the Pope was in Havana he became fired by this notion - this mission, belief - in what he now calls "a human and geographical unity that goes from the North to the South Pole". That's why the document he signed in Mexico urged creation of "hemisphere unity between Latin and North America".

American politicians in both parties are, by now, quite used to flexing their jaw muscles and biting the lip, if not the bullet, when John Paul II is about to appear. They're used to being scolded one way or the other either for enacting laws which insult the Catholic population of their states or proposing new laws that would insult everyone else.

The notion of an American unity from Pole to Pole stated just that way is very attractive to any American - any North American - who has a taste for rhetoric. A just society from Pole to Pole - it's worthy of Kipling if not of Ted Sorrensen, who wrote Kennedy's soaring and rhetorical inaugural address.

Unfortunately for the United States the Pope was not being rhetorical. He had a quite specific, and for the United States, painful prescription in mind. The United States, as the only superpower, now has a separate obligation not required by the rest - the obligation to be the leader and exemplar for all the others.

In other times he's soothed the ears of prosperous America by condemning the human degradation of Communism. This time he attacked capitalism itself for relying wholly, as the Marxists did, on an economic conception of man. Which country did he have in mind? All of them that now merged in the error of globalisation, which - he didn't believe, he asserted - had caused environmental disaster everywhere.

Here, having told the United States to illegalise abortion and abolish capital punishment, he also pointed with that trembling hand to the United States as the model, not of a just society yet, but a prosperous society that equates materialism with human success and ignores the gap, which in prosperous countries is widening, between the rich and the poor.

In the end he came back to Aristotle's principle that the first aim of government must be the condition of the poor.

A last line that, more than anything else in his visit I think, will offend Americans as much as anybody - the hundreds of thousands of charitable agencies and millions of individuals who help the neighbours and hundreds of companies that do what the Pope scolded them for not doing: maintaining, funding health clinics, research units, good television, libraries, the slums, in addition to the pension plans, health plans, disability, maternity and other plans that long ago supplemented the benevolence of the Social Security Act 1937 and have reduced the population of the poor - it's been calculated by an independent agency - to about a fifth of what it would be without them. They are a larger segment of the ordinary people than in any other country.

By the way, when I came into this country to stay, my father-in-law took me aside one day - a gaunt, austere New Englander, think of the forbidding features of Mr Justice Holmes - and explained to me the system or principle by which "we" lived.

"A third of your income should go for rent" he said, "a third for food and 10% to your charities." This was news to me. No such rules had applied in England. To be truthful and shameful I don't remember ever subscribing to a charity except to buy a poppy on Armistice Day and other such anniversary trifles.

However, I assumed that the 10% theory must be in the Constitution and thereafter tried in a very wobbly fashion to live up to it. If this is new to you it's known as tithing - it's compulsory on all Mormons and obligatory among very many Americans, religious or not.

Which reminds me: there's a country in Europe - I dearly hope it isn't England - committed, what to me, is the worst act of social legislation since the Second War. Namely to disallow as income exempt all charitable contributions. What seems to me a rather smug and thoughtless intrusion of government which stifles the necessary urge to help other people and makes a charitable gift almost a saintly act of self sacrifice. Enough.

I understand that the Pope was on the verge of announcing this united hemisphere policy this time last year in Havana when Miss Monica Lewinsky intervened in world affairs and swept the media, including all the flown-in television anchor people, off to the hub of world affairs which they should never have left - namely, Washington DC.

The mention of which may have revived a question that surely must have snuck up on you the second I started to talk about the Pope and his arrival in St Louis where he was to be greeted by - guess whom - the President of the United States.

The question: "How?" as Maureen Dowd put it - one of our sharpest Washington commentators - "How?" she asked, "after ignoring so many 'thou shalt nots', how can Mr Clinton snuggle up to John Paul II and wrap himself in the beatific glow of his Holiness's holyness?"

"Well," as the children say, "no problem."

Miss Dowd goes on: "There they were in a dark stuffy airplane hangar an astonishing odd couple: the infallible and the incessantly fallible, the moral pillar and the moral contortionist, the Holy Father and the very prodigal son."

Not only did Mr Clinton take the Pope's arm and help him to walk, adopting - without affectation - the role of the good Samaritan. He then put on a very solemn face and told the Pope - the Pope, mind you: "People still need to hear your message that all are God's children and have fallen short of glory."

Had he anyone in particular in mind? It was a line that gave the Republican senators, watching the television replay, conniption fits.

And any hope that somehow the president would be intimidated was blasted by a final television shot that gave the Republicans a second bout of conniption fits. It was a sign just behind the curtain on the improvised stage in the hangar where they met. The sign on the men's room door. It read simply: "President or Holy Father only".

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