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"Welcome to our country, our new friend!" President Jimmy Carter ex-claimed. The date was Oct. 6, 1979, the place the South Lawn of the White House, the new friend Pope John Paul II, who at the time had been pope for less than a year. It was indeed the start of a noteworthy relationship, though not perhaps quite as President Carter expected.
When a definitive history of our times is written, the interactions of John Paul II with American chief executives from Carter on will make a fascinating chapter. The account will shed significant light on the papacy and the presidency in an era of momentous change.
It won't be a tale of unbroken harmony. On that day back in 1979 Jimmy Carter spoke of himself and John Paul as world leaders "striving together for a common future of peace and love." But the relationship between Rome and Washington since then has been a great deal more complex than "peace and love" alone suggest.
So far in this pontificate, the convergence of interests between the Holy See and the White House probably was greatest in the Reagan years. Then the president and the pope shared an interest in combating the "evil empire" (Reagan's words) called the Soviet Union. Some commentators go so far as to suggest de facto cooperation of a sort in pursuing anti-communism.
However that may be, John Paul II and Ronald Reagan unquestionably both got what they wanted. In one version of events, the key role in the unraveling of communism was played by Reagan's military buildup, while in another the revolution of the spirit touched off by John Paul's visits to his Polish homeland was the deciding factor. Whichever version you prefer, the bottom line is a historic fact — the liberation of Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union itself, the end of the Cold War.
By contrast, the biggest clash between the pope and an American president came over Bill Clinton's pro-abortion policy, which John Paul stoutly opposed. The struggle came to a head at the United Nations' world population conference in Cairo in September 1994.
Early in the year, the pope sent a letter to every head of state warning that the pro-abortion position of the draft document prepared for the conference, along with other anti-family, anti-life provisions, threatened "a moral decline resulting in a serious setback for humanity." He followed that with a series of talks over the summer defending family rights and opposing abortion.
At Cairo the U.S. and Vatican delegations slugged it out. (The American delegation was led in its early days by Vice President Al Gore.) A significant number of Third World countries backed the Holy See. The result was at least a qualified victory for John Paul. The conference backed off from extreme positions on population control and abortion supported by the Clinton administration and its friends.
John Paul's relationship with the administration of George W. Bush has had its ups and downs. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the Vatican supported the American military response in Afghanistan as self-defense. But the pope publicly and repeatedly opposed the Iraq war, just as he had opposed the Gulf War launched against Iraq in 1991 by the first President Bush.
Unlike some of those who took this stand, John Paul carefully avoided an anti-American tone. And although he has never said in so many words exactly how he does view the world's only superpower, from things already on the record it isn't difficult to guess.
During his October 1995 visit to the United Nations and the United States, the pope often reminded Americans that their country exerts an enormously powerful influence — military, political, economic, cultural, and moral — throughout the world. In that context, he called on the United States to live up to its best traditions of ordered liberty, grounded in faith in God and in the moral law, and expressed in its founding documents.
"Democracy cannot be sustained without a shared commitment to certain moral truths about the human person and human community," John Paul declared at a Mass in Baltimore. "Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought."
Now, that's the sort of thing you'd expect a real friend to say.
Russell Shaw writes from Washington for the Knights of Columbus and serves as a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.
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