To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > News March 15, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/03/15/pope Sometimes sorry isn't good enough The pope's vague act of contrition does nothing to address the Vatican's pro-war policies. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Colman McCarthy Adult Roman Catholics with sharp memories can recall priests and nuns of their childhoods offering advice on confessing sins -- "going into the box," as the phrase went. Be specific, be contrite and promise to sin no more. Of those three standards for true repentance, Pope John Paul II, in his March 12 plea for divine forgiveness for sins committed by his church in the past 2,000 years, met only one. He was contrite. On specific sins, the pope offered the incense of smoky generalities. Not included in John Paul's confession were the names of earlier sinner popes, most now remembered only by hagiographers, or Catholicism's public crimes that were sanctioned by churchmen or doctrine. Specifics were also absent from the 19,000 word document "Memory and Reconciliation: the Church and the Faults of the Past" that accompanied the papal self-pardoning. "Past faults" and "scandals of the past" cover a multitude of undefined sins. The pope's vagueness raises a question -- not about past sins but about possible current ones. For what sins of today's church might a pope in the year 4000 -- perhaps John Paul XXXIV -- be begging forgiveness? What policies of today's Vatican will be weepingly regretted 10 or 20 centuries from now? Start with violence. At no time in John Paul's papacy has he renounced the church's just-war theory. He has never wavered from Catholic teaching that violence can be used to repel violence. With some 35 wars or conflicts currently bloodying the Earth, and with as many as 40,000 deaths a month -- mostly the poor killing the poor with weapons made in rich nations -- where is any statement by the pope calling on Catholics to refuse to cooperate in any way with military violence? It is accepted as normal that Catholic colleges in the United States host ROTC programs, that Catholic priests serve as military chaplains, that Catholics pay federal taxes that guarantee the Department of Defense $700 million a day, that Catholics work for weapons companies, that Catholic pilots bomb people in Iraq or Kosovo. Catholics who reject church teaching on the just war can expect no support from John Paul. In the early 1980s, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle refused to pay that portion of his federal income taxes -- about 50 percent -- that went to the Pentagon. He received no personal or moral support from the Vatican. The opposite message came through. Near the time of the Hunthausen war tax revolt -- which philosophically aligned him with many members of the three traditional peace churches, the Mennonites, Quakers and Church of the Brethren -- John Paul was appointing John O'Connor the archbishop of New York and, soon after, consecrating him a cardinal. O'Connor had been a Navy chaplain, rising to the rank of rear admiral, during the Vietnam War. Hawkish, he wrote a 1968 book stoutly supporting U.S. military policies in Southeast Asia. At the time of O'Connor's appointment to the nation's richest diocese, the pope was widely reported to have said, "I want a man just like me in New York." During World War II, Catholic bishops in both France and Germany were claiming that their side was waging a just war. In June 1982, the pope visited Argentina, a nation then at war with Britain. The Argentine clergy supported their government's warmaking. On arriving at the Buenos Aires airport, they and the junta's generals piously surrounded John Paul, with banners in the background saying "Holy Father, bless our just war" and "May God defend our cause because we defend His." Philip Berrigan is caged in the Baltimore County Detention Center awaiting a trial scheduled to begin Monday on counts of sabotage, malicious destruction of property, conspiracy and trespass. On Dec. 19, he and three other pacifists attempted to disarm two A-10 Thunderbolt warplanes at the Warfield Air National Guard facility in Essex, Md. This type of plane was the main delivery system for deadly depleted uranium in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. Berrigan, his wife Elizabeth McAlister, his brother Rev. Daniel Berrigan and a full cellblock of other pacifists have been repeatedly imprisoned for their conscientious objection to U.S. militarism. They see Christianity as a religion of nonviolence, based on the love of enemies and resistance to the power of Caesar and pharaohs. One possible reason for John Paul's lack of support for these members of his flock is their refusal to support church leadership. In his 1996 book "Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes With the American Empire," Berrigan writes that the church "is even more conservative, perhaps, than our government. Not conservative in the sense of 'conserving' the Gospel, but in maintaining useless rituals and policies that are designed to protect, and perpetuate, the institution." He continues, "To guarantee this, control of the clergy and Catholic laypeople is essential." What, then, might a more thorough apology from the pontiff have sounded like? "If the church wanted to come to grips with the Gospel," Berrigan writes, "it would have to give up its property and its exemptions from the state, and involve itself with resistance on a major scale. It would have to resist the violence against our poor, and stop pretending that one political party is more humane than the other." Is this the bile of an authority-loathing crank or the words of a prophet calling power to accountability? History supplies the hint of an answer. We look back at Francis of Assisi of the 13th century, or Teresa of Avila of the 16th. Both were blunt-speaking truth-tellers, critical of church leaders. Francis joined the church's Fourth Crusade but after seeing the killing and gore of the first battle, deserted. He returned to his hometown to serve poor people. Once long dead, and their devoutness more remembered than their dissidence, both Francis and Teresa were canonized saints. The churchmen who gave little support to Francis and Teresa must be forgiven, their misdeeds surely included in the general absolution given March 12 by John Paul. Until a few more centuries' worth of sins pile up and a future pope calls for Forgiveness Round II, it's only speculation as to whom the church is sinning against today. We'll know more later. salon.com | March 15, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Colman McCarthy is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post and the founder and director of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington.