The alliance that wasn't

12/06/2006

BBC Television recently repeated the thesis put forward by Carl Bernstein that Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan formed a ?holy alliance? to bring down the Communist empire. But, as the librarian of Heythrop College in the University of London points out, the facts do not support the scenario. It has become an industry. A new major biography of the Pope appears once a year and they get bigger all the time. My own effort, published in 1994, runs to a relatively modest 300 pages of text. Tad Szulc?s followed in 1995: a work of just under 500 pages, excluding notes, bibliography and index. In 1996 Bernstein and Politi collaborated on His Holiness, which numbers 500 pages of text, including the prologue. And now there is Man of the Century by Jonathan Kwitny, nearly 700 pages, not counting notes and index.

The biographies are obviously in competition. So, too, it would appear, are the biographers. Kwitny is not sympathetic to Carl Bernstein and says so at length, specifically criticising his claim that there was a holy alliance between President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II to bring about the destruction of Communism. This theory was first advanced by Bernstein in an article which appeared in Time magazine in February 1992, and was enunciated at length in His Holiness. I reviewed this book for the Guardian and was not persuaded by the authors? claim. It was, I recall writing, a triumph of rhetoric over substance. Kwitny has now provided chapter and verse to confirm my initial impression. In its overall thesis, he comments, the Bernstein Time cover article was a work of fiction from beginning to end. He has interviewed some of those whose words Bernstein cites: they deny ever saying what Bernstein claimed they said.

The Bernstein thesis was revisited in Rivals for Paradise, televised by BBC 1 on 9 November as the block-buster opening for a new series of Everyman (see my review in The Tablet for15 November). Richard Allen, Reagan?s national security advisor, declared in the course of the film that the alignment of interest between the Vatican and the White House turned into an alliance . . . the greatest secret alliance of modern time. Evidence of this alliance, the programme argued, was, first, collaboration over Poland; secondly, tacit acceptance by the Pope of Reagan?s Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars); and thirdly, co-operation over the suppression of liberation theology, especially in Central America.

That to some degree there was a commonalty of interest between Pope and President there is no denying. Their views on economics may have been light years apart, but both shared a desire to see the end of what Reagan famously termed the evil empire. Evidence for an alliance, however, simply will not stand up.

To take the first point: collaboration over Poland. A major plank of Reagan?s policy after the imposition of martial law by the Polish leader, General Jaruzelski, in 1982 was to impose economic sanctions on the country. For this policy he claimed papal support. He did not have it. John Paul was firmly opposed to sanctions and resented being cited as being in favour of them. He complained in a private letter to Reagan, which the President misrepresented as backing his policy. The Vatican was therefore driven to take the unusual step of protesting publicly at the misrepresentation.

On the second point, John Paul was actively opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons by the United States Government, and said so. In his New Year message for 1985 he specifically condemned the Star Wars programme (projects for global space systems ? quoted by Kwitny, p. 529).

Thirdly, in Latin America, it needed no alliance for the Pope to denounce liberation theology. John Paul had obvious reasons to do so: he was profoundly unsympathetic to the Marxism he believed motivated liberation theologians. He was equally profoundly opposed to the possibility of violence, something which had been countenanced by Paul VI ? and, indeed, by the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero. As a conservative theologian he could not but be alarmed by the suggestion of liberation theology that doctrinal utterances are inevitably socially conditioned; and as someone with a high view of the papal office, he likewise could not but be alarmed by the subversion of ecclesiastical authority which the development of base communities and an iglesia popular could be seen as implying. This questioning of church authority was most evident in the role of the priests, very often at odds with their bishops, whereas in Poland the political clergy were acting largely under the direction of the hierarchy ? certainly not in opposition.

The makers of the BBC programme did not have to rely on Bernstein for mistakes. They were quite capable of making their own, and in the middle of Rivals for Paradise there was an egregious error. It was not a matter of interpretation, something about which there could be legitimate differences of opinion. It was just plain wrong. It came from the mouth of Mark Wyatt, once CIA bureau chief in Milan. The programme stated clearly that Giovanni Battista Montini was Archbishop of Milan in 1948. He was not. He did not become archbishop for another half-dozen years. Yet Wyatt insisted that he had used United States government funds to provide Montini with loud-speaker vans to help him conduct a campaign against the Italian Communist Party in the crucial elections of 1948.

The point was central to the programme?s thesis that the Vatican had made a pact with the devil ? Fascism ? out of fear of world domination by Communism, and then, when Fascism was no more, with what was apparently the next best thing, the United States. Montini?s supposed American links at the time of the 1948 election were presented not only as evidence of a pro-American stance in Vatican diplomatic relations, but as evidence of continued right-wing leanings. But it was not Montini. Wyatt may have made a simple mistake.

It was important to the programme makers to highlight Montini, because of course he became in time Pope Paul VI. It was particularly unfair, however, as he had a well-deserved reputation as an opponent of Fascism. Two other Vatican officials, Achille Ratti and Eugenio Pacelli, were featured prominently for the same reason: both became Popes after diplomatic careers (in Ratti?s case an extremely short diplomatic career) which, the programme alleged, involved negotiations with the Russians. The evidence for this is so marginal as to be insignificant. The suggestion that Ratti and Pacelli engaged in direct contact with the Soviet regime was only one of the suggestiones falsi with which the programme abounded.

Take, for example, the testimony of Fr Jozef Tischner. He claimed that it was beyond the reach of anyone?s imagination that a member of the Polish working class should have become Pope, as had happened with Karol Wojtyla. This was an ideological assertion, aimed directly at Marxism. But Wojtyla was only briefly a worker in the sense implied, under the Nazi domination of his country. He had been born into the petite bourgeoisie, like other popes before him, and at university had moved into the middle-class intellectual ?lite. Or take the assertion by an ex-KGB official that the Bulgarians would not have acted on their own in an assassination attempt on John Paul II, but would have had the KGB behind them. Indeed; but there is no serious evidence that the Bulgarians were behind the attempt at all ? and there is absolutely no evidence, despite the opening of Russian archives since the fall of Communism, that the KGB had anything to do with it either. The programme did not acknowledge this.

Whether the thesis of Rivals for Paradise was as wrong-headed as much of the evidence produced for it was erroneous is an altogether different question. That the two competing ideologies of Communism and Catholicism battled for 80 years is not in dispute. There is, moreover, ample evidence, not cited in this programme, that in the 1920s and early 1930s church hierarchs were sympathetic to Fascism; one has only to instance the suppression of the Popular Party in Italy and the Centre Party in Germany, or the text added by Pius XI to Nell-Breunning?s draft of Quadragesimo Anno, defending the corporate State.

When Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre claimed that Pius XII out of a passive complicity . . . endorsed the Holocaust, no one on the programme queried so extraordinary a judgement. But then they apparently did not question any of the evidence presented; nor did they wonder, as they ought to have done, why their witnesses were saying what they were. They did not question the claim that the Fatima vision had, even before Russia?s October 1917 revolution, called prophetically for prayers for the conversion of that country ? a message added only a decade after the original apparition.

One wonders who it was at the BBC who was persuaded by the Bernstein thesis of a holy alliance. The complaint against Rivals for Paradise is not simply that it was wrong, but that it was irresponsibly wrong.