PERSPECTIVE ON PAPAL VISIT

A Message Discomfiting to All

John Paul II agrees with Marx and Engels that capitalism is the most corrosive social force in history.

By BENJAMIN SCHWARZ

Pope John Paul II's visit can't help but make the American political class squirm. For very good reasons, liberals and conservatives alike find him vexing. Conservatives applaud his aggressive championing of traditional values, but they are exasperated by his increasingly insistent rebuke of capitalism. For its part, the left warms to his cry for "a more just sharing of the goods of the world," but finds his defense of the traditional family and his uncompromising position on a host of social issues—abortion foremost among them—silly or abhorrent.

At bottom, the pope troubles both groups because his position exposes the inconsistency and hypocrisy of their views and the hollowness of the political and cultural debate.

The pope recognizes that the triumph of global capitalism has created a vast international economic elite and startling levels of economic inequality, both within and among nations. And even more important, while he acknowledges the astonishing economic growth that capitalism engenders, he deplores its spiritual consequences—the "radical capitalist ideology that encourages instincts that lead to consumer attitudes and lifestyles." He knows that capitalism, which glorifies competition and whose very essence is the gratification of desires and the incessant invention of new ones, affords a free rein to the worst aspects of human nature—to our appetites and to what Adam Smith acknowledged to be our "envy, pride and ambition."

John Paul II understands that the free market perforce elevates individual choice as the highest good; the radical individualism it engenders—an individualism free from family, community and civic responsibility—uproots and destroys all traditional values and social relations. It is, simply, the most corrosive social force in world history. And so, like true conservatives from Edmund Burke to Hillaire Belloc, the pope concurs with Marx and Engels' description of capitalism's destructive effects: "Uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation. . . . All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away. . . . All that is solid melts into air. All that is holy is profaned."

Those who call themselves conservatives fail to recognize that the free market they embrace destroys the "community" and "family values" they espouse. At the same time, what passes for the left in America seems not to realize that the unlimited autonomy of individual desire and the "personal liberation" that it celebrates goes hand in hand with the very economic system it finds so disquieting.

Americans should listen to John Paul II, for he diagnoses the whole of an ill that the lines of today's political and cultural debate have erroneously divided. Social conservatives and economic radicals should start listening to one another, for in many ways their critiques are opposite sides of the same coin, and together their views would form a potent political force, recalling an American political, religious and economic tradition long neglected.

From Thomas Jefferson, John Taylor of Caroline and the anti-Federalists to the 19th century Populists, and from the Nashville Agrarians to members of the "old right" and New Left, many of America's most penetrating thinkers have dreaded free-market capitalism precisely because it reduces individuals to abstractions, anonymous buyers and sellers whose claims on each other are determined solely by the capacity to pay, and thereby destroys the human and Christian ties that, they have believed, bind men and women into communities.

If those groups that are now talking past each other—urging on the one hand greater economic justice, and on the other the restoration of moral and spiritual values—heed the pope's critique and explore America's own dissident tradition, they'll see just how closely their goals are related, and America's political and cultural forces could be fundamentally realigned.

Benjamin Schwarz is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly magazine and a contributing editor to the Times' Book Review

Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All rights reserved

The Pope pleaded, we didn't listen
It's conveniently ignored that John Paul strongly opposed Bush on Iraq

OK, I get it, the pope was a really important guy. So why, during weeks of fawning coverage of his humanity and the elaborate Vatican funeral rituals, did American journalists and politicians ignore the pontiff's passionate opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq?

Pope John Paul II's critique of the Bush doctrine of unilateral preemptive war couldn't have been clearer, more heartfelt or more vigorously argued.

He once showed anger on the topic in a private audience with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and firmly rejected the direct appeals of Catholic neoconservatives to support the invasion. He used not just his bully pulpit but the full political machinery of the Vatican to try to stop what he saw as an act that did not meet the Christian definition of "just war" — and was rather "a defeat for humanity."

"War cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the military operations," John Paul proclaimed on Jan. 13, 2003, even as he was sending his emissaries to Iraq, the U.S. and the United Nations to lobby for peaceful negotiations. "War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations."

It hardly honors the man to ignore his impassioned statements on what he considered to be a great moral crisis. And whether through divine inspiration or his own formidable instincts honed through a long life in a troubled and violent century, the pope got it right on Iraq when he said, "No to war!"

President Bush has sloughed off the issue of the pope's anti-war stance as what you'd expect from a religious leader: "Of course he was a man of peace and he didn't like war," he said after the pope's death.

But John Paul's assertion that the peaceful alternatives to a U.S.-British invasion of Iraq had not been exhausted went far beyond bland denunciations of violence. Like the millions of anti-war protesters around the world, he knew what the U.S. media and Congress refused to see: that Bush was rushing to war based on convenient distortions about weapons of mass destruction and the war on terrorism.

The Bush administration was concerned enough with the pope's stance that a crack team of Catholic neoconservative ideologues was sent to lobby his holiness. In February 2003, hawkish columnist Michael Novak and self-appointed morals czar William J. Bennett were dispatched to a Rome meeting with Vatican officials arranged by the State Department to explain why the invasion of Iraq would be a "just war" of self-defense. Novak warned Vatican officials that there was no time for peaceful initiatives because Saddam Hussein had empowered Iraqi scientists "to breed huge destruction in the United States and Europe."

The pope pointedly rejected such alarmist arguments and instead, on the eve of the invasion, endorsed the European proposal to rely on U.N. inspectors in Iraq and to provide a greater role for U.N. peacekeepers as an alternative to U.S. occupation of a crucial Muslim nation. "At this hour of international worry, we all feel the need to look to God and beg him to grant us the great gift of peace," he said, rejecting a rush to war.

After he was ignored, the pope continued to strongly oppose what he saw as a dangerous escalation in tension between the Islamic and Christian worlds. "War must never be allowed to divide the religions of the world," he said.

John Paul was particularly scathing after the revelations of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, telling Bush on a visit to the Vatican that those "deplorable events" had "troubled the civic and religious conscience of all." And remember: This was not a man raised in the confines of the Holy See, but rather a tough old bird who had witnessed the Holocaust and struggled against Soviet tyranny and communist oppression for decades. He did not come to his anti-war views lightly.

Various bipartisan investigations have shown us the truth behind the Iraq war: Its rationales were fabricated by a Western intelligence community under enormous pressure to provide the Bush and Blair administrations with support for a decision they already had made. That makes it all but impossible to question the wisdom of John Paul's positions on the war and on American arrogance. Instead, the Bush administration and an acquiescent media have found it best to simply ignore them.