REJOINDER TO MR. VAN DEN HAAG
613
It is unnecessary to confront those who still have faith in freedom
with a choice between Rome and Moscow in order to justify some
form of common
political
action in behalf of an imperfectly free society.
If
it was legitimate to send aid to Stalin to withstand Hitler's onslaught,
it is certainly permissible in some historical circumstances to support
churchmen against Stalinist terror. Cardinal Mindzenty is a human
being like any other, and those miserable "liberals" whose hostility to
the Church led them to gloss over his martyrdom as incidental to the
hypocritical land reforms of a satellite regime will some day themselves
suffer his fate if Soviet expansion is not brought to a halt. But to accept
the myths of the Church-not for oneself, of course, but for the herd!–
is superfluous folly. It is comparable to the stupendous blunder of those
who thought that we couldn't send aid to Stalin without promulgating
the lie that the Soviet Union was genuinely interested in the defense or
extension of democracy and that therefore public criticism of its ter–
roristic regime should be discouraged.
You remind me that "one may oppose some of its policies without
opposing the Church."
If
this is possible, why is it not equally possible
to support some of its policies without supporting the Church? Just
think what you are asking of us. We are to evaluate particular Church
policies on specific matters-European Union, trade unionism, birth
control and divorce, race relations, support of Franco--taking and
rejecting what seems to be required in the interests of a free society.
But we are not to evaluate the Church myths: we are to accept
them and teach them
in toto
(or at least not criticize them) as medi–
cinal lies for the masses. In this you insult those whom you wish to
teach, who are not so stupid as to fail to see through your own theology
of disbelief, as well as those genuinely pious believers for whom the
passion of Christ is not a "pragmatic" fairy tale in the strategy of the
cold war.
Even in terms of the narrow, and somewhat cynical, use to which
you wish to put faith in Church dogma, your recommendation is self–
defeating. You do not explain why the Communist threat is strongest
in countries in which the Catholic tradition has the deepest hold. You
do not explain the failure of a selective application of Church policies
to meet the problems of land reform and overpopulation, in a country
like Italy, problems which require something less than Utopia to mitigate
if not to solve. You do not explain the disastrous political ineptitude
and worse of the Church in Austria and Germany; its role in the Abys–
sinian War and Franco's rebellion-events which made multitudes an
easy prey to Stalinist duplicity; its freedom-loving behavior in Quebec,
