Keys of This Blood (23 page)

On the religious side of the supranational ledger, Judaism professedly and explicitly claims to be the religion and faith of the physical descendants of Abraham. It does and always has been willing to accept converts from all other religions. It does and always has maintained the universality of its great moral laws. But, properly speaking, ethnicity is endemic to Judaism. This of itself precludes a genuine georeligious note from Judaism.

When Islam, with its special brand of religious fervor, burst upon the
Middle Eastern scene, it was nothing if not a firebrand of international aim and ambition. In its spread, however, it became an international assemblage of local communities. And though those communities were marked by a close similarity in religious faith and in principles of moral behavior, there has been no unique, central authority—a lack clearly understood by the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. Furthermore, even in its heyday of European conquest, Islam has never surpassed the cultural roots of its origins. Supranational and georeligious are not terms that suit Islam.

Still, if neither age, nor experiments and adaptations, nor religious fervor are enough in themselves to provide supranational capability, what about all those breakaway creations that have derived from Catholicism itself? Cannot at least some of them be looked to for the same supranational capabilities as the Roman institution? After all, the Orthodox Russian and Greek churches did accept the ancient councils that defined the basics of Christian dogma, faith and practice. What more of a beating heart could be needed?

Here again, however, those same limiting factors first faced by Peter and the early Apostles repeatedly raised their heads. For nationalist and racial themes have rarely been absent from the religion of Eastern Christianity in all its branches.

The two patriarchal sees of Constantinople and Moscow are the focal points of churches whose Christianity is steeped by now in the racial, cultural and linguistic characteristics of Greek and Slav respectively. And each is based on its own tradition of nationalism.

In his autobiography of 1988, Archbishop Iakovos, Greek Primate of North and South America, essentially joined his voice to that of the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople when he exulted in “the Orthodox [Greek and Russian]
oikumene
”—the lands and peoples who share the Eastern Orthodox faith. On the Greek side of that Orthodox
oikumene
, however, stand no fewer than thirteen independent (or “autocephalous”) churches, plus four semi-independent (or “autonomous”) churches, plus two monasteries, one on the Greek island of Patmos and one in the Sinai Peninsula. As to authority, the Patriarch of Constantinople is the titular head of this assemblage of churches, but only as the “first among equals.” As in any federation, decisions are reached by a vote of consensus. One code of law governs all members; but enforcement and, to a degree, even interpretation of that code is left to each individual church or monastery.

In the Russian equation, meanwhile, Pimen, the late Patriarch of Moscow, did not seem to share Archbishop Iakovos's sense of ecumenism. Instead, he joined his predecessors in that patriarchate in speaking of a stubbornly separatist view—of “Mother Russia” and of the “Holy
Church of Mother Russia” as the focus of Church unity and the locus of its community.

Once such limiting factors as land and people take on a dominant role, things seem to splinter still further. Vasken I, the eighty-year-old Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians—a population of about 6.5 million worldwide—declared on February 5, 1989, in New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, that “we [Armenians] are one people with one mother Church, with one fatherland, with one destiny and one future.” That one fatherland is Armenia. And that one mother Church is not composed of Eastern Orthodoxy's
oikumene
; or even of “Mother Russia.” It is specifically defined as the fourth-century cathedral at Etchmiadzin near Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia.

One way or another, that separatist pattern has been repeated by the many churches and splinter sects—sometimes calculated to be nearly three thousand in number—that resulted from the sixteenth-century Protestant revolt against the papacy.

Some have achieved an impressive growth. The Anglican community, though relatively small in membership, is a worldwide organization. But it, too, remains a federation of local churches, in which membership and principles of behavior and communal action are determined by consensus. No obloquy or disrepute attaches to those who secede from these associations; and no unique authority binds the community as a single unit.

Whatever the size of their membership or the structure they employ, few of the churches that trace their existence to the Roman Church of earlier centuries have escaped a more or less continual splintering into ever-smaller communities, whose aims, institutional organizations and authority all shrink with every new branch torn from each transplanted tree.

As to other religious organizations—post-Christian revisionist groups, for example, such as Unitarians, Mormons, Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses—it would be unrealistic to speak of any of them in terms of georeligious or supranational capability. And it would be fanciful for secular leaders—not a fanciful lot—to call upon such groups to galvanize the world against armed international oppression such as Hitler represented; or to enter an East-West dispute as a credible and effective arbiter among nations.

Even such a cursory survey can leave no doubt that by 1958, as the nineteen-year reign of Pope Pius XII drew to its close, he passed on to his successors an organization recognized by his secular peers as unique
in the world as a global, supranational, independent and borderless power of immense proportions.

Everywhere they might look, in fact, other wielders of power in the world arena could see the particulars of the georeligious power of the Holy See. It lay in the major Vatican Congregations, or ministries, through which the Pope governs the religious and moral life of his global community. It lay in the far-flung ecclesial network of 1,920 dioceses comprising 211,156 parishes; and in some 3,000 bishops and 483,488 priests who tend those dioceses and parishes.

The lifeblood of all these and more—of the Vatican Congregations and everything they administer—is the personal authority of the Roman Pontiff. His coat of arms—the Keys of Peter beneath the triple tiara—placed over door lintels, stamped on letterheads, carved in wall plaques, embedded in official seals, is but one ever-present and never-fading statement of the source of that personal power. The holder of those Keys authorizes a living network of representatives to speak directly for him. He dispatches his own on-the-spot spokesmen abroad to act for him in at least ninety countries.

Those spokesmen in particular are not, any one of them, members of any local hierarchy. Nor are they dependent on any other source but the Pope for funds, instruction, moral support or inspiration as they cover the world, taking in all nations and every culture and religion. These personal representatives of the Holy Father are the twentieth-century version of the net Peter was bid by Jesus “to cast out over the deep waters.”

Like any secular diplomatic corps, this personal papal network is divided into ranks of some complexity. In this case, the rankings go by such names as Apostolic Delegate, Nuncio, Pro-Nuncio, Internuncio, Chargé d'Affaires, Apostolic Delegate and Envoy, and so on through a diplomatic system as intricate and complete as the most sophisticated of its secular counterparts. Thus, each rank is designed to cover a particular type of mission. And each rank, each title and each mission functions as a working, living part of a global system of government and influence whose center is the Vatican and whose embodiment is the Pope himself in his international designation as the “Holy See.”

What focuses the attention of these papal representatives and guides their practical judgments is not the status of their locales as precise and individual entities. It is the status of those locales as members of the global community.

What captures the unwavering attention of the secular leaders of the world in this remarkable network of the Roman Catholic Church is
precisely the fact that it places at the personal disposal of the Pope a supranational, supracontinental, supra-trade-bloc structure that is so built and oriented that if tomorrow or next week, by a sudden miracle, a one-world government were established, the Church would not have to undergo any essential structural change in order to retain its dominant position and to further its global aims.

The most important facts and details about the Roman Church from the point of view of any secular power holder, however, all come down to one point. There is a tacit agreement among the great international political and financial leaders that the very attributes that give the Holy See its georeligious power and capability provide it, as well, with everything essential for the same power and capability on the political plane. In secular eyes, the Roman Church stands alone in every practical sense—and not merely among religious and ethical structures and groups—as the first fully realized, fully practicing and totally independent geopolitical force in the current world arena. And the Pope, as the sole legitimate head of the Holy See's organizational institution and structures—as the only one who fixes the overall goal of that institution's efforts—is by definition the world's first fully fledged geopolitical leader.

Of course, the Catholic Church did not freeze in its institutional tracks when Pius XII left the scene. Immediately after his death, in fact, and long before Cardinal Malula's plaintive cry “Everything must change!” there began a series of pontificates for which there were no precedents in all the turbulent history of the Holy See. No one—friend or enemy—could have been prepared for the changes that came so suddenly with the election of Angelo Cardinal Roncalli as Pope John XXIII, in October of 1958. “Good Pope John,” as people sometimes liked to call him, became the first in a line of four popes to date who have taken up a new and hitherto unheard-of papal stance.

Overtly, and in so many words, John declared that in this age, in his moment as Holy Father, the Church had decided to open itself to the world in an unprecedented way, to engage in the affairs of men in a way that was never the Church's way for all its nineteen hundred years of history.

The first prime characteristic of the new papal stance as John XXIII presented it was summed up on one word:
aggiornamento
—an “updating,” in which the Church would “open its windows,” would open itself up to the world in a way for which there was no parallel in the reign of any of the 261 popes who had come before.

John, in fact, was quite explicit when he spoke to the bishops assembled in St. Peter's Basilica on October 11, 1962, at the opening of his
Second Vatican Council. Formerly, he said, the Church enforced the doctrine of faith by means of sanctions and punitive methods for violations of the papacy's teaching. This was now changing, he went on. The Church had decided, as Mother of all men's souls, to rely on explanation and dialogue in order to exact obedience, along with understanding, from its children. Why this change? Because, John explained, once the Church explains to a man the error of his ways and the correct doctrine of faith for belief and moral practice, he will accept it.

John XXIII's fundamental error here was to believe in a sort of natural goodness in all men and women, a goodness of such a kind that it could
and would
prevent them from following the dictates of evil—the evil in themselves as a remnant of Original Sin, and the evil around them borne by “the world, the Devil and the flesh.” It was, on the Pontiff's part, a grave misunderstanding of a sacred Church dogma, and at the same time, a piece of naïveté that is hard to understand in a man of his wide pastoral experience.

But, in fact, by that decision, John had misleadingly renounced one chief function of the Holder of the Keys of authority given him as Peter's successor. Technically, it was—perhaps all unconsciously—an act of misfeasance in high office. Practically speaking, it provided for the antiChurch and the superforce just the opening they needed to overturn the authority of Peter. If only John had lived to see how that “natural goodness” reacted to
Humanae Vitae
, the encyclical letter of his successor, Paul VI, about the inherent sinfulness of contraceptive methods! If only he could have foreseen that two thirds of the Church's bishops would, by 1975, have taken his words as a cue to them that they could cease to be authoritative pastors, cease indeed to obey papal laws and observe papal wishes!

John XXIII's application of his new principle of Church government was just as counterproductive when it was applied to the difficult relationship between the Church and the Soviet Union.

The second major characteristic of this astounding change demonstrated in a practical way just how profound its implications were for international affairs in the geopolitical arena. For suddenly, after so many years of such mighty efforts to break the Holy See's uncompromising attitude toward Leninist Marxism, the Soviet Union was dumbfounded to find itself included within the scope of personal and official papal attention.

John XXIII engaged in a personal correspondence with Soviet Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev. He received Khrushchev's son-in-law,
Izvestia
editor Aleksei Adzhubei, in the Pope's private library. And—most stunning
of all after more than forty years of muscular and untempered enmity—John made an agreement with Khrushchev: In the Second Vatican Council, which the Pope had announced as the very vehicle of his Church's new opening to the world, there would be no official condemnation by the Holy See of the Soviet Union, or of its Leninist Marxism.

If the world was dazed by Pope John's words and actions, it was not unwilling to capitalize on the “windows” he opened so trustingly, or to enter as many of the geopolitical structures as it found suddenly unlocked, or to contribute to the Church's “updating” in ways John had neither foreseen nor intended.