PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

by Priscilla Hart

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ITALY
Persia’s Prince Abolghasse Amini, 85, came to Rome 30 years ago to convince the Italian government and the Vatican to grant him permission to build a mosque – Europe’s largest. Building permits had earlier been denied by Benito Mussolini (“First build a Catholic church for us in Mecca”) and then by the Vatican on the grounds that a minaret on Monte Mario would rise higher than the dome of St. Peter’s. Today, after decades of polemics, a 42-meter (130-foot) tall minaret of the mosque is rising over Rome as Amini hoped. The enormous structure will open at the beginning of 1992, with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the project’s chief sponsor, attending. The massive structure has cost $60 million, about half from Saudi Arabia. For Amini, mission accomplished.

BURMA
She captured the world’s heart and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Aung San Suu Kyi, seen by many of her countrymen as the successor of her father, who led Burma’s struggle for independence against Britain before being assassinated, has been under house arrest for more than two years. Change in Burma, described by one writer as “jail with 40 million prisoners and 200,000 guards,” will come only when China and Thailand no longer bolster the regime economically.”

LITHUANIA
Following charges that murderers were being pardoned in his court, Lithuanian Supreme Court Justice Genadijus Slauta claimed innocence. Since 1989, Slauta’s court has been legally rehabilitating Lithuanians who during post-World War II occupation were tried in politically-motivated Soviet-run kangaroo courts and sentenced for crimes they did not commit because of their political affiliation. Using former KGB files, the Lithuanian court has corrected the legal status of about 25,000 individuals. But among them are a handful of men (at least 11 so far) believed to have participated in the mass murder of Jews. At the time of the Soviet occupation in 1941, Jews numbered 255,000 in Lithuania. By the war’s end they had been reduced to 3,000. The Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles first drew attention to the cases. In response, Judge Slauta said the miscarriage of justice occurred because the court decided not to restudy the cases of those sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment or less. “‘How could the courts give such short sentences to mass murderers?’ we thought,” Slauta said. “We were trying to rehabilitate everybody as quickly as possible. Now we are sorry we acted so rapidly. We see serious errors were made.”

MALTA
High-level Rabbis, Buddhists, Catholics, and Shiites were last seen holding hands in these numbers in Assisi, at the Vatican-sponsored Day of Prayer in 1986. A similar ecumenical gesture was made in October on the Mediterranean island of Malta. At the fifth annual international interreligious meeting sponsored by the Italian Catholic community of St. Egidio, Chief Rabbit Shear-Yeshuv Cohen of Haifa, the Grand Mufti of Cairo Sheikh Mohamed Tantay, Catholic Patriarch of Iraq Raphael Bidawid, and Cardinal Edward J. Cassidy, President of the Vatican’s Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, linked arms to lead an ecumenical procession down the streets of Malta’s capital La Valletta. Among the nearly 200 representatives attending the three-day conference was Cardinal Jozef Clemp of Poland (patron of the St. Egidio community). Talk inevitably turned to divisions between Arabs and Jews in Israel. “We must learn to de-demonize each other,” said Rabbi David Rosen of the Anti-Defamation League in Jerusalem.

LEBANON
There may be new hope for Terry Anderson, 44, an American hostage held for six years in Lebanon. Anderson appeared in October on a video taped by his kidnappers, hinting that he might be released soon. He appeared to be in good health. Anderson, the longest held captive in Lebanon, was kidnapped in March 1985 by the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad (Holy War) underground Moslem group. He is one of four Americans, two Germans, and a Briton being held by groups loyal to Iran in Lebanon.

RUSSIA
Orthodox churchgoers in Russia may not want the Pope to visit, but some former communists there do. Soviet Academy of Science member and former consultant to the Central Committee of the Communist Party Alexander Tsypko has appealed to Pope John Paul II to come “immediately” to Moscow to “reinforce the political center,” meaning Gorbachev. Tsypko made his appeal in Turin, Italy, at a convention on religion in Europe sponsored by the Giovanni Agnelli Foundation. Tsypko said the Pope should go to offer his support to Gorbachev because the Soviet leader “had done everything possible to liberate Poland,” the Pope’s homeland. “The Pope could reinforce the central power,” Tsypko said. “He could help Gorbachev morally by explaining to Soviet citizens Gorbachev’s role in the reestablishing of fundamental freedoms. Someone like this needs to come to us, a very high moral authority, who says, ‘Men and women, be attentive, reflect…’” Tsypko warned against thinking that the Soviet ruling classes had changed their ways. “There is no centrist intelligentsia, no democratic intelligentsia, open to western values together with the traditions of the country, including Christian values. This is why it is highly unlikely that our society will become truly democratic.” Tsypko acknowleged the irony of his proposal for a papal trip. “Yes, it is a paradox. But wasn’t it a paradox that the secretary general of the Soviet Union’s communist party did everything possible to free Poland?”

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The old Communist Party journal Kommunist, rebaptized Svabodnaya Mysi (Free Thought) has come a long way. Its recent pages featured a piece by Soviet intellectual Nikolai Kovalski, describing the social doctrine of the Catholic Church in glowing terms. Kovalski, who is the Soviet Union’s leading expert on religious problems, appealed to the Soviet leadership to learn the “useful lessons” of the Church in renewing herself. “In the last 100 years, the Church has shown a singular capacity for renewal,” Kovalski said. This was not always the case, the Soviet expert claimed. One of the worst periods was at the end of the 19th century, when “it seemed that the Catholic Church fell behind an entire epoch.” This crisis could have marked the end of the Church. But instead it rose to the challenge and launched a program of renewal formulated in the historic encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII (1891). Renewal continued in the activity of the “great reformer-pope John XXIII, “in the “collective thought” of the ecumenical council from 1962 to 1965, and in the ideas of the current Pope John Paul II, formulated in his encyclical Centesimus Annus. This encyclical was written with the future in mind, Kovalski said. It offered “a program of activity for the coming

TURKEY
Turkish President Turgut Ozal has decided to strike out against the separatist Kurds straddling the border between his country and Iraq. When the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) killed 24 people, 17 of them Turkish soldiers, at an isolated frontier post in southeastern Turkey, the Turkish army retaliated by bombing the small retreating PKK army for three days. The new head of the coalition government under Ozal, Suleyman Demirel, has said terror will be answered with terror, and that the Iraqi government in Baghdad may be held accountable if it does not get the border violence under control.

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Bartholomew, born Dmitri Arhondoni, is the new ecumenical patriarch of the world’s 135 million Orthodox Christians. The former Metropolitan of Chalcedon was elected October 22 from among the 15 members of the church’s Holy Synod. Technically, Turkish law does not allow a patriarch to preside over any faithful outside the country’s borders – a stipulation put in place after Turkey’s war of independence in 1923. But while government officials may not recognize the patriarch’s leadership worldwide, the rest of the world does: only 3,000 Orthodox believers remain in Turkey, while the overwhelming majority resides in the former Soviet Union and southeastern Europe. By tradition, Bartholomew was made the Orthodox Archbishop of Constantinople, a position assumed by patriarchs since the split with Rome in 1054. As well as being a multi-lingual scholar, Bartholomew, 51, is also an experienced church diplomat whom observers feel will work for unity and ecumenism.Bartholomew’s predecessor Dimitrios I died of a heart attack in October in Istanbul. He was 77.

MEXICO
In the country where Graham Greene’s famed “Whiskey Priest” chose to return home and face execution at the hands of Mexican revolutionaries, church-state relations have been legally non-existent since Mexico adopted its constitution in 1917. That constitution forbade church inheritance of property, the establishing of religious orders, the wearing of religious vestments in public, and religious marriages. Mexico’s modern-day provisions against the church were so severe they made old communist constitutions in eastern Europe – which theoretically acknowledged the presence of the church – appear liberal. But all that is about to change. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who promised to improve church-state relations when he became president in 1988, has taken steps to remove the anti-church provisions in the constitution. The government initiative has been praised by the Mexican bishops, who have hastened to add that the clergy will not assume political power once they are legally recognized.

VATICAN
With a nyet heard around the world, Patriarch of Moscow Alexis II rejected Pope John Paul II’s offer to attend the December Special Synod on Europe in Rome. Headlines announced a new “cold war” between Roman and Russian Orthodox Church. Said Alexis: “Our participation at the meeting in Rome would have an ambiguous appearance. Public opinion throughout the Christian world would be misled about the true nature of current relations between our churches.” On the plane taking him to Brazil, Pope John Paul II said, “We invited all those who could be – indeed should be – interested. If I invite them, I am doing my best. If they don’t accept, what can I do?” With the Patriarch’s nyet, many saw hopes dashed for a papal trip to Moscow in the coming year. It is unlikely that Gorbachev or any other Soviet leader could officially invite the Pope without the placet of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Holy Synod.

Alexis’ specific grievances concerned what he called the Catholic Church’s “almost shameless” proselytism in Russia and its support for Catholics in the conflict over church property. In its letter, the Vatican addressed the charge that it was attempting to create “parallel missionary structures” in Russia. The recent appointments of Catholic bishops in mission territories were done only “to give legitimate pastors to Catholics who for 70 years have lived under great spiritual disadvantage.” The Vatican statement noted the Orthodox also give spiritual and diocesan support to “small” Orthodox communities in western Europe and the two Americas. Despite the hardening of the Orthodox position, the Patriarch insisted that he did not want to close the door to dialogue. “We have come a long way together,” he said.

WORLD
The new World Bank President Lewis Preston is either talking big or he will soon put new lending conditions on bank borrowers. This time poor nations eager to get credit from the global bank may have to cut their defense budgets. While Preston defended “the sovereign right of nations to decide” how much to spend on arms, he said that “if we found a situation where defense expenditure was 35 to 40 percent of the budget, we might wonder if it was an appropriate use” for World Bank funds. Preston spoke at a joint meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Bangkok in October. Recent statistics show at least 14 countries spend over 10 percent of their gross national product on military weapons and soldiers. Iraq tops the list at 30.7 percent, followed by Yemen (22 percent), Jordan (21 percent), North Korea (20 percent), Oman (19 percent), Nicaragua (17 percent), Saudi Arabia (16 percent), Guyana (14 percent), Israel (14 percent), Soviet Union (13 percent), Libya (13 percent), and Syria (11 percent).

December 1991

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PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

Khmer Rouge Commander Returns to Cambodia, Cuban Opposition Leader Is Assaulted, German Foreign Affairs Minister Protests Britain’s“Bomber Harris” Monument, A German neo-Nazi Leader Is Attacked…

ITALY
Guido Viola, a prominent Italian anti-Mafia investigator, is on the look-out for new Mafia inroads in the prosperous economy of northern Italy. Viola, a former state prosecutor who recently went into private practice, said investigations showed that the Mafia has infiltrated Italian real estate and financial services sectors by buying out faltering companies. “Financial services companies are growing like mushrooms,” said Viola, who won fame as prosecutor at several Red Brigade urban terrorism trials. He was also prosecutor at the trial of the late Mafia financier Michele Sindona, who poisoned himself in March 1986 while serving a life prison sentence for ordering a murder. The northern Italian city of Milan is at the center of recent investigations into Mafia activity, and its “tarnished image” has been the subject of debate in recent Italian newspapers. Milan will host the summer Olympics in 2000.

JAPAN
Three years ago, Japan’s emperor Hirohito lay dying with massive hemorrhaging. As the rest of the country mourned his slow death over a period of months, the mayor of Nagaski was one of the few Japanese to publicly assert the emperor’s guilt in Japan’s involvement in World War II. Ostracized nationally, Motoshima Hitoshi, a Christian, was then shot by a fanatic. He survived. Now Tokyo-born East Asian scholar Norma Fields asks: to what extent was Hitoshi’s “anti-nationalist” act linked to his Christianity? Field’s new book In the Realm of a Dying Emperor is emblematic of the kind of soul-searching about Japanese-American relations going on in Japan and America these days. As the superpower vacuum grows, Japan, from an American perspective, becomes a mightier rival and friend. Field’s effort, like others, is an attempt to determine what common – and contrary – values the two powers have. Fields probes the issue by profiling three Japanese who in Hirohito’s dying days spoke of the emperor’s guilt. As the rest of the nation – including leading intellectuals and liberals – invoked an image of a peace-loving emperor tarnished only by a tragic inability to stop a war fought in his name, Motoshima broke the national taboo: “I’m not saying the emperor was the only one responsible for the war. Many people, myself included. I respect and love the emperor as a symbol, but I still think he bears responsibility for the war.” Hirohito was partially responsible, the mayor said, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the earlier invasion of Okinawa because he chose not to end the war sooner. Un-Japanese? Author Norma Fields proposes that all three profiled “dissenters” depart from the national consensus not because of their religious affiliation, or any other association, but because they seek the truth. So do the “little people” who quietly sent letters of support to the mayor after his “anti-nationalist” statements, who included farmers, housewives, students, and imperial army veterans. Wrote one: “I want to retain my conscience. I do not want to engage in concealment of the truth, distortion of history.”

CAMBODIA
He was the Khmer Rouge’s chief executioner, responsible for the special Tuol Sleng interrogation center where more than 20,000 people were tortured, photographed and then taken to a killing field to be clubbed to death. From 1975 to 1979, his party murdered one million people. Now Son Sen, the Khmer Rouge’s defense minister, together with Khieu Samphan, the organization’s president, is back – and being protected by a UN peacekeeping force. George Orwell would have enjoyed the doublespeak: the return of Cambodia’s mass murderers is part of a UN peace plan. Ever since the Khmer Rouge’s exile to Thailand by Vietnamese forces 13 years ago, four main Cambodian factions have been fighting each other. Now a Supreme National Council made up of representaties of those factions is supposed to lead the country’s 8 million citizens toward free elections in 18 months. The Council includes the Khmer Rouge, whom some believe are more dangerous if excluded from the peace plan than if kept within it. The Khmer Rouge were never crushed as a fighting force, never agreed to unconditional surrender, and have continued to prey on Cambodians, with the support of China and Thailand. But the way forward looks shaky at best. Samphan was nearly lynched when he returned to Phnom Penh on November 27. When crowds stormed his residence he took refuge in a cupboard. Just as he was about to be hanged, security forces arrived. The uncertainties surrounding the planning of the attack raise larger doubts about the peace process. The protest might have been spontaneous, but it could also have been organized by Hun Sen, head of the Vietnamese-backed Phnom Penh government. Might this and other government-sponsored aggressions convince Samphan’s boss Pol Pot, who founded the Khmer Rouge, to teach the regime a lesson on the battlefield? Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who heads the Council and one of the factions (and was imprisoned by Pol Pot), is hopeful the Khmer Rouge will wither away with free elections. But they have not withered away yet.

CUBA
On November 19, a leading Cuban dissident and poet, Maria Elena Cruz Varela, was beaten, dragged by her hair and forced on gag on copies of her own writing when her Havana home was attacked by 200 pro-regime demonstrators. News of the attack was not covered by Cuba’s state media but was leaked by a source linked to the National Revolutionary Police (PNR). Cruz Varela and six others were taken to a local police station after being beaten by the crowd. She and four others were released after several hours. Two detainees were transferred to another police station. Cruz Varela, who is president of an opposition movement of Cuba intellectuals called Criterio Alternativo, was meeting with dissidents at her house at the time of the attack, reported a Spanish journal.

INDIA
As recent Orthodox-Catholic fighting over church property shows, rival claims to religious property can create nightmares. One Asian country has tried to settle the matter with a “Places of Worship Bill” which prohibits the conversion of places of worship and maintains their status quo. India passed the bill in the Lok Sabha, its lower house of parliament, on September 10. Professor Saral Chatterjee of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society in New Delhi described the bill as “a ray of hope at the end of a dark tunnel the country had passed through last year.” The new legislation came in the wake of a nationwide campaign last year by a Hindu revivalist group to capture a mosque site in northern India: the Babri Masjid Mosque in Ayodha, Uttar Pradesh, in northeast India, which Hindus regard as the birth place of their god-king Rama. Members of parliament belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People’s Party) opposed the legislation and tore copies of the bill inside the Lok Sabha and walked out before the bill was put to vote. Contending that several Hindu temples were converted into Moslem mosques during the 11th to 17th centuries by Moslem rules, the BJP insists that they must be returned to the Hindus.

EAST TIMOR
He has been called Asia’s Oscar Romero, a reference to the El Salvadoran bishop who challenged human rights abuses in his country and was assassinated by a military-backed death squad in 1980. The allusion is clear: for Bishop Ximenes Belo of Dili, time may be running out. Belo has been on the front line of opposition to Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony forcibly annexed by its larger neighbor in 1976. By calling attention to human rights abuses by Indonesian security forces and supporting the Portuguese-backed proposal for a referendum on East Timor’s independence, Bishop Belo has made himself a potential target for military reprisal. Supported by the local church, Belo has opposed the stance of Indonesia’s Episcopal hierarchy, which accepted Indonesia’s absorption of East Timor as its “27th province.” At issue in the Belo-led campaign is the survival of the East Timorese culture, closely linked with the 400-year-old tradition of the (formerly colonial) East Timorese Church.

GERMANY
For Germans, “old wounds” could be reopened if plans are not stopped to erect a London monument to Sir Arthur Harris, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) commander who ordered the bombardment of Germany cities during World War II. The controversial monument-to-be has alarmed even top-level German officials. Minister for Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher said in early December that he had raised “very serious” concerns about the initiative with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd. Cologne’s mayor Norbert Burger, with other German mayors, has protested the project, which has been supported by an association of RAF veterans. During the Second World War, Cologne, like many other German cities, underwent extensive bombardment which almost entirely destroyed the city center.

FRANCE
Communist readers of France, unite: the communist press needs your support. According to Roland Leroy, director of the French Communist Party newspaper L’Humanite, his journal is losing readers and money. “The situation has never been so bad,” Leroy wrote in a two-page report published November 26. The newspaper’s deficit tripled from 1989 to 1990 to a total of 21 million franc ($3.8 million). L’Humanite, with a daily circulation of 110,000, lost 10,000 subscribers in 1990.

GERMANY
In the first known major attack on German rightists, the house of prominent neo-Nazi Karl Polacek was attacked on October 26 by a masked anarchist gang. Gas bombs were hurled at Polacek’s home in the West German town of Mackenrode, and 15 people were injured. Anarchists and neo-Nazis clashed the same day in the East German towns of Arnstadt and Marlishausen. The anti-Nazi assaults are the first violent response to the more than 500 attacks on foreign workers and asylum seekers in Germany in the first nine months of 1991. But is the “ugly German” really on the rise? Journalist Monika Prangemeier investigate that question recently in the pages of the British weekly The Tablet. Recent polls show something quite different from what’s going on in the streets, Pangemeier said. The majority of Germans accept foreigners in their midst. An October poll, for example, revealed that 60% of Germans approved of foreign residents, while 28% did not. On the identity of those who attack foreigners, Prangemeier notes: “Although skinheads and members of right wing political groupings like neo-Nazis are to be found in the front line, they represent only a small minority, for the estimated membership of right wing organizations in Germany is no more than 36,000, and most skinheads are not politically active.” Since 1986, Germany has taken in more immigrants than any western European country. Foreigners now number about 5 million – approximately 8% of the population.

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When East met West last year in Germany, the issue of abortion got more complicated. In pre-union days, West Germany allowed abortion under presumably “strict” circumstances: a doctor had to determine whether a woman choosing to abort would suffer physically or psychologically if she bore a child. That legislation reflected a compromise between Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian allies, back by the Catholic Church, and the more liberal Social Democrats and Free Democrats. Reunification with East Germany, however, seems to have tipped the scales further in favor of abortion advocates. Under communism, East Germans were allowed abortion on demand for the first trimester of pregnancy. Now many of their Christian Democratic leaders seem ready to back that position in the all-German Parliament. Catholic Bavarians are furious at the prospect of more lenient abortion legislation. Kohl in past personal campaigns has handled the issue by saying it is a matter for the conscience of each deputy but not for the party itself. But his party is now dividing into two camps as this spring’s regional elections approach. As a result, Kohl’s already fragile coalition is becoming even more so.

AUSTRIA
How Jewish was Sigmund Freud? Not very, most scholars used to agree. But now two experts on the Viennese psychoanalyst have reopened the debate. The usual argument, most recently heard from Yale professor Peter Gay in his bestseller Freud: A Life For Our Time, is that Freud grew up under the secular influences of his parents and was exposed to little traditional Hebrew study. Now Emanuel Rice and Yosef Hayim Yershalmi claim in separate books that Freud’s parents may have taken their faith more seriously than it appears, and that Freud had significant Hebrew schooling. The focus of their study is Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud dealt with a specifically religious subject for the first time. According to both authors, Freud’s interest in Judaism reflected an attempt to return to his Jewish roots, and Yerushalmi highlights the handing over of the family Bible to the 35-year-old Freud by his father Jakob as a pivotal incident: in the inscription, written in melitzah – a compilation of quotations in the Bible and other Jewish sources which have a straightforward literal meaning but are suffused with subtle allusions – Jakob angrily commanded Sigmund “to return to the Bible, to the originally shared values of your father.”

January 1992

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PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

“Man of the Century” Gorbachev In Post-Soviet World,

VATICAN
“No more war in Yugoslavia – no more war in the precious land of Croatia and nearby regions, where passions and violence challenge reason and good sense,” John Paul II declared before a crowd of thousands in St. Peter’s Square during his traditional Urbi et Orbi message on Christmas day. Two days later – and a week after the Vatican announced it would recognize Croatia’s and Slovenia’s sovereignty – Cardinal Florenzo Angelini, 75, head of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Workers, was carrying food and medical supplies to Croatia’s wounded and dying as the coordinator of a humanitarian mission from the Vatican. It was the first of a number of scheduled shuttles by Angelini between Rome and Eastern Europe in his capacity as the Pope’s special envoy. On his three-day mission, which began December 27 in Slovenia’s capital city of Ljubliana, Angelini also stopped in Croatia’s capital Zagreb and the Croatian city of Dubrovnik, as well as hospitals and towns in the war zones.

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He was called “man of the year” by Time when he ignited a revolution in the then-Soviet Union some seven years ago. Now he has been dubbed the “man of the century” by some observers – or at least the most important political figure of the post-war period. At the same time, most now see him as a man whose historical role is finished. Is Mikhail Gorbachev a shooting star which has blazed out? Perhaps not, says the Vatican’s former Secretary of State Cardinal Agostino Casaroli. “I’m not convinced,” said the 77-year-old former diplomat, who represented the Vatican in the historic “Red Square” encounter with Gorbachev in 1988 which opened the way to renewed diplomatic ties between Rome and the Kremlin, in a recent interview. “Certainly the picture has changed. But I am impressed by the man, and I’m not so sure the case is closed. We have to see how things develop in the future. What exact form this new Commonwealth of Independent States will take after the latest consultations and decisions among those who today guide them and how it will overcome the difficult challenges it faces is not clear.” Casaroli, who forced the Vatican’s Ostpolitik (its policy toward the East block countries) in the post-war years, said that Gorbachev’s role in transforming the history of church-state relations on the eve of the millennium remained untarnished despite his many failures and oversights – a theme echoed recently in the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper Osservatore Romano and by the Pope himself in the official communiqué that followed the visit of Russian President Boris Yeltsin to the Vatican December 20. The communiqué cited in its opening lines the “particular innovative contribution” by President Gorbachev to “the former Soviet Union.” “Gorbachev is still young,” Casaroli said. “It would be difficult to put him in a museum.”

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Spies are being discovered everywhere these days – in Berlin, in London past (the alleged “mole” Giordano Bruno – and present, even in the Vatican. In a recent interview with an Italian journal, Jesuit Father Robert Graham, 79, perhaps the world’s leading expert on 20th-century Vatican diplomacy, said the American, Italian, English and German secret services in particular have had a special interest in the Vatican because “it is the center of a world religion with deep roots and traditions in every corner of the globe.” Graham, who last fall published a lengthy article on the Vatican and espionage in the semiofficial Jesuit journal Civita Cattolica explained how various secret services might attempt to “penetrate” the Vatican. “These services could get hold of a priest who needed money, instruct him on what to do, and send him around to gather information,” Graham said. Graham said it was unlikely that the Vatican’s personnel, whom he said were selected with extreme care, cooperated with secret service agents. Two “exceptional” cases were Rudolph von Gerlach, a monsignor who assisted the Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Gasparri during World War I, and an Italian who was the head of the Vatican’s security police at that time. Gerlach was in continual contact with German and Austrian governments, Graham said. The key office to infiltrate for whose who would spy on the Vatican is the Cipher Office, through which all the Vatican’s secret correspondence passes, Graham said. During World War I, the head of Vatican security passed the Vatican code and cipher book to SIM, the Italian military secret service. “So the Italian secret service knew the contents of all the messages which nuncios from around the world were sending to the Vatican.” The white-haired historian said things were easier for secret services today. “Technological progress has made it increasingly easy to tap into telephone conversations,” Graham said. British spy Robin Robinson, until recently one of the top officials of the British secret service, has recently revealed that the British often intercepted the telephone messages of the Holy See, the Jesuit said. And new spying devices using laser beams are revolutionizing spying, he added. “I have been told that one can simply aim a special laser apparatus at the Pope’s room and here everything being said inside,” Graham said. “And with today’s technology, it’s a joke to place an electronic bug in a room.” Asked whether the Holy Father has had his chambers checked for bugs in order to remove them, Graham replied, “Perhaps.”

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The Vatican Apostolic Library, directed by renowned paleographer Father Leonard Boyle preserves one of the richest collections of manuscript miniatures (illuminations) in the world – so rich that it would take more than 30 years of non-stop viewing for one person to see them all. Enter: the data bank. At the initiative of the French School of Rome, Christiane Baryla is computerizing the 800,000 miniatures contained in the library’s 75,000 manuscripts. With the help of a team of technicians, Baryla hopes that in a decade it will be possible for a researcher interested in pursuing a specific theme in the miniatures to retrieve relevant images with the flick of a finger. Baryla and her co-workers have so far catalogued the first 50,000 illuminations of a collection bequeathed by Queen Christina of Sweden after her conversion to Catholicism The work will reveal “a true European patrimony, because all of these manuscripts traveled very widely in Europe five and six centuries ago,” Baryla said.

GERMANY
Erich Honeker, the former East German communist leader who built the Berlin Wall in 1961, is on the run. Where might he hole up, and who will help him escape? Since March, when Honeker fled to Moscow to escape trial for his “shoot to kill” policy directed at Germans trying to scale the Wall, Germans have been nervously discussing his fate. Easterners want his crimes punished. They, and many westerners, say that subordinates (former body guards) have been called to justice the shootings, while big shots, including former members of the Politburo and the Stasi (east German secret police) instead enjoy the privileges of consumer society with handsome royalties on their books and prestigious talk-show appearances. But West Germany is in an embarrassing position. It wined and dined the former leader just two years before the Wall came down. It sent him home with solid West German credit in his pocket in an effort toward accommodation with its other half. Some West Germans argue that if Honecker were brought to trial, the charges could not stick and the government would be make to look foolish. As the tabletalk continues, West German authorities are trying to stop a possible fast get-away by Honecker to Chile or North Korea.

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After Hitler’s suicide in April 1945, the word sieg – meaning “victory” – disappeared from public parlance. It was replaced by erfolg – meaning “success” as well as “victory”. Language mirrors power relationships. So when German Chancellor Helmut Kohl used sieg in December in Brussels to refer to a “great victory for German foreign policy” after other European governments, despite American objections, agreed with Germany to recognize Croatia and Slovenia on January 15, some American government officials winced. “Speaking of sieg would bother me if it became a constant in German politics,” said Robert Gerard Livingston, a retired American diplomat who has specialized in German affairs for four decades.

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Civilian slaughter, kangaroo courts, the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre in Poland: as the hidden history of the communist era floods into light with the opening of government files in Eastern Europe, the latest chapter casts still more darkness on the past. According to a new 800-page study published in the German city of Neukerchen-Vluyn, the former East German secret service Stasi penetrated Germany’s Protestant churches to a much great extent than previously believed. The study, compiled by Gerhard Besier, director of the Protestant Academy in West Berlin and Stephan Wolf, a former staff member in charge of Stasi files, says that many church members cooperated as spies and that the former secret service had “unofficial informants” on both sides of the Iron Curtain – over 40 in 1989 alone in West German church offices and synods.

MEXICO
After 75 years, Mexico’s churches has been legalized. Priests are now allowed to vote, churches may be legally administered and owned, and religions habits may be worn in public. The historical vote cam in December, when Mexico’s house of deputies approved a modification o the constitution to allow state recognition of Catholic and Protestant churches. The law passed by a large majority (460 to 22). Priests still are legally prohibited from participating in politics, and the state will not return religious art, colonial churches, or monasteries and other property it now considers part of the “national patrimony.” The Catholic Church, which underwent severe persecution in the earlier 20th century, reemerging only later to administer churches and schools in defiance of the law, has been legally vindicated. Still, all is not settled. The deputies will now debate the law’s specific articles. The law then passes to the Senate. The December vote was a victory for President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whose own ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has become the undisputed authority during its 60-year rule. Salinas has strongly advocated “modernizing” church-state relations in Mexico. With a 96 percent Catholic population, Mexico did not “wish to live in pretense,” he said.

ENGLAND
For more than ten years, Soviet KGB agents used Brompton Oratory, one of the most beautiful churches in London, as a “dead letter box” (DLB). Secret material was placed behind a marble column just inside the church. The hiding place was revealed in a fascinating new book by former double agent Oleg Gordievsky entitled Instructions From the Centre – Top Secret Files on the KGB Foreign Operations 1975-1985. Gordievsky, a KGB colonel and Resident-designate in London at the time of his escape from the Soviet Union in 1985, had been working for the British Intelligence Service, M16, as a penetration agent inside the KGB since 1974. At some sites, including Brompton Oratory, material such as film was planed for KGB agents to collect. At others, known as signal sites, chewing gum or chalk marks were used to send coded messages. All have been used as recently as the mid-1980s. A report typed by an unnamed KGB agent to “The Centre,” KGB headquarters in Moscow, dated April 1985, reproduced in the book, reveals that Brompton Oratory, situated near Harrods department store, was regarded as the safest place in London to pass top secret material from one secret agent to another. “People go in and out of it [the Oratory] all day and no one pays attention to them,” the agent wrote. “The church is not ‘state property’ so there are no people keeping a round-the-clock watch on it. I would be inclined to think there is no safer place in Central London. According to the KGB agent, the letter box is near the right-hand entrance to the Oratory, in the Chapel of St Patrick. KGB officers dropped off their secret reports after leaving chalk marks in Mayfair less than a mile away. The KGB memorandum states: “Just to the left of the altar as you face it are two large marble columns. Both are very close to the wall. The DLB site is behind the column nearest to the wall (if you are facing them, it is the right-hand column), in a little space between the actual column and the wall. For more than 20 years Father Gregory Hemy heard confessions directly opposite the dead letter box, unaware that the shadowy figures who from time to time came and collected little packages were KGB agents. Gordievsky does not reveal in his book that, thanks to his information, the British security service M15 knew about the Brompton Oratory dead letter box for 10 years. Whenever a KGB agent hailed a taxi to the Brompton Oratory, it was a member of the British secret service who bent down in front of Father Hemy first.

February 1992

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PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

RUSSIA
A High Russian Orthodox Church official explains Orthodox-Catholic Tensions From the Orthodox Perspective

In the first interview granted by a high Russian Orthodox Church official following the refusal by Patriarch of Moscow to send a “fraternal delegate” to the December Synod in Rome, Metropolitan Kirill, minister of foreign affairs for the Orthodox Patriarch, drew clear lines between those he thought “fraternal” and “unfraternal” on the Catholic side of the divide. “If we considered the Catholic Church as a hierarchy and people, I agree that there aren’t great conflicts [between Orthodox and Catholics],” Kirill said in a December 17 interview. “In contrast, there is the political policy the Vatican conducts toward the Russian Orthodox Church… When I speak with Catholic bishops I feel I am in a fraternal relationship with them. I feel differently about the meetings I’ve had with the representatives of Vatican politics.”

Kirill, 45, was appointed head of the Patriarch’s external relations office just two years ago. At the time he pronounced himself in favor of recognizing the Uniate Church – a position which he says caused him to be attacked by conservatives in his own church. But Kirill’s ecumenism, which reflects the broader outlook of a new generation of Orthodox leaders, comes with a clear critical edge. The current conflict between Orthodox and Catholics is “a personal tragedy,” he said, but has an evident political cause. In contrast to the bishops of western Europe, who are “truly ecumenical,” the Vatican has worked together with the (unecumenical) eastern bishops to plan conquest, he charged. “The Eastern [Catholic] episcopate sees the former communist countries – in particular the Soviet Union – as territory to be conquered,” the Metropolitan said. “In fact, the Catholic Church in Russia is constructing its structure not with a pastoral aim, but with a missionary one.”

Kirill acknowledged the pastoral reasons for the appointment of new apostolic administrators in Siberia and in Kazakhstan, where there are Catholics who were exiled there by Stalin. “But in Novosibirsk, where there is a very small Catholic community, a big structure has been set up to proselytize among our people, and Polish missionaries continue to arrive. If we recognize the demographic changes in Siberia, we also have to recognize them in western Ukraine, where an Orthodox community was formed in the last 50 years and is not being stripped of everything, subject to the violence of the Uniate Catholics.”

“Catholic brothers should help us [in the task of Othodox evangelization, not sabotage us with parallel structures which exploit our weakness,” he said. “The Catholic Church is a guest in Russian territory, as we are guests in the West.” At a time when Russian young people are rediscovering their faith and returning to the Orthodox Church, Catholic youths at the University of Moscow and in Novosibirsk are telling them about the Orthodox Church’s compromise with the communist regime, Kirill said. “Now if a Catholic says to them, ‘No, you must come with us,’ he distances them from the mother Church. These things are happening. Now Russian youths find the idea of going to Italy or France alluring. To me this is base proselytism.”

Asked about the Apostolic Administrator for Russia, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, Kirill said, “I still don’t know him well. But I can say that the Orthodox in Belarus, where he comes from, have a very positive opinion of him.” Of growing anti-Catholic feelings in some parts of the Orthodox Church, Kirill had little to say. Told about a recent publication and sale in Zagorsk of a turn-of-the-century anti-Catholic catechism, Kirill said, “This is not an official initiative of the Patriarch. There is a free market and this literature sells well. Unfortunately, being ecumenical today among us is not popular and is also dangerous.”

February 1992

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PRESS REVIEW

Catholic World Report
February 1992

REPLY TO AN APPEAL
It was an avalanche of bitter words.

Writing in response to the “Appeal to the Serbian Bishops” from Orthodox theologians and writers publicized in the November 27 issue of the French daily Le Monde, Serbian Orthodox bishop Athanase Jevtic, bishop of Banat, held little back. “No one, and especially not you, the Orthodox signatories of this appeal, have the right to deny the Serbian people the memory of their innocent victims, their martyr saints in th name of Christ,” the bishop wrote. “From your peaceful western shelters, you dare to sermonize the Serbian bishops, including those in the war zones,” Jevtic wrote in the December 27 issue of Le Monde. “One of these bishops is Msgr. Lucien of Slovenia, just recently released after several months of detention by the Croatian militia. Four others, with their faithful, had to abandon their Episcopal sees. There are the people whom you advise to stop the ‘cries over the victims of the past,’ and adopt ‘a lucid critical vision of reality…’

“As a Serbian theologian and, for several months, bishop of Banat, I have described in several of my works… the calvary of the Orthodox Serbs, from Kosovo to the mass graves of Jadvno. I did so already a decade ago, when the communists of Serbia and Croatia – those who are today still in power in the two republics, despite the fact that they have been rebaptized ‘democrats’ or ‘socialists’ – were absolutely powerful and prohibited all of us, as you do today, from speaking of the genocide committed by the Astashi against the Orthodox Serbs. Instead, they vaunted – as you do – the communist utopia of ‘peaceful cohabitation’ of the Serbs and Croatians in the western Krajinas, and of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo-Metochie…

“But you, with serene conscience, say: ‘The Croatian government had absolutely no intention of committing genocide!’ This same government took away from the Serbian people living in the borders of communist Croatia the most elementary individual and national rights, literally eliminated this people as the legitimate inhabitants of the administrative territory of Croatia, and confiscated their right to their national language, their alphabet, their history, and their culture…

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PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

THE VATICAN
Shocking and unacceptable. That is how John Paul II recently characterized the rising tide of racism and xenophobia throughout Europe against African and Middle Eastern immigrants and workers. In a January 18 address, the Pope specifically condemned racism in France and asked European governments to address the problems of millions of foreign workers from poverty-stricken regions of Africa, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union against whom punitive laws have been passed. The most recent such law was approved by the French government. It called for the creation of “transit areas” for political refugees and immigrants awaiting permission to enter the country. This would create an undetermined number of small camps in which men, women and children fleeing from the depressed regions of the Third World would be concentrated. “It is unacceptable that human rights be ignored and solidarity between people negated,” the Pope said.

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John Paul II continues to break all previous records for saint-making. In the 13 years since his election, John Paul II has canonized or beatified 658 persons, an average of 50 a year, nearly one a week. According to the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, there are 262 new saints and 396 new blessed since 1978. This is unprecedented. For most of the period since 1588, when the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints was established, canonizations have come years apart, and pontiffs traditionally celebrated one canonization only. Then, with Pius XII in the mid-20th century, holy men and women began to be recognized in unprecedented numbers. Pope Pacelli canonized and beatified 56 persons over 19 years, John XXIII 12 over five years, and Paul VI 50 over fifteen years.

Today’s Pope is also the first to celebrate canonizations not only in Christian Europe, but around the globe, from the Philippines to Madagascar, from Korea to Lebanon.
Reaffirming the Christian leaven in every culture and environment, the saint-making process has at times been controversial. Besides the dozens of little known religious remembered primarily within their own congregations, processes are underway for laypeople who have shown heroic virtue. Among the: Salvo D’Acquista, the Italian police officer who saved the lives of 22 hostages about to be executed by Germans outside Rome on September 23, 1943, by assuming blame for an attempted political assassination he did not commit, and Marcello Candia, the Lombard businessmen who gave up his career to go to the Amazon to care for lepers. Each story is unique: a Milanese pediatrician Gianna Beretta, who died in 1962, was diagnosed as having a uterine tumor while in the midst of her fourth pregnancy and preferred to carry the baby to term knowing that she would have to pay with death, rather than accept an abortion.
In his recently published Santi a Dantita Dopo II Concilio (Saints and Sainthood After the Vatican Council II), Italian author Flavio Pelose looks at how saints have been made in recent decades, focusing on the national origins of the laypeople, martyrs, and religious raised to the altars. Italy, he shows, tops the list. Spain follows, with France and Germany taking third and fourth places. Canada placed fifth and Poland, together with Holland, sixth.

Meanwhile, an interview with American journalist Kenneth Woodward, whose book Making Saints has been published in five languages, recently appeared in the pages of the popular Italian weekend magazine Il Venerdi. Woodward had criticized the canonization process under John Paul II as too “summary” and spoke of his recent article in Newsweek about Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriba de Balaguer in this context. “Let’s be very clear: I do not oppose, either personally or professionally, the canonization of Escriva. I am instead concerned about the weakening of the entire process of canonization. The process has become too summary. John Paul has canonized more people than all his predecessors in this century put together. The devil’s advocate has been removed. This makes it possible for the most influential movements in the Church to take short cuts regarding their ‘saints.’ The Escriva case, in my view, should compel the Church to rethink the whole process. And if Opus Dei believes the criticisms are unfair it should simply make public the 6,000 pages of the position, the evidence provided in support of the beatification of its founder. These documents are presently secret, and that’s very strange.”

Catholic World Report
March 1992