Who Is “Ideologically Schizophrenic,” The Pope or Today’s Liberals?

When I became a Catholic at the age of 67, I was a political liberal in the Franklin Roosevelt tradition. Nine years later, I still am.

If anything, my Catholic experience has strengthened my liberal ideals, which have been freshly stimulated by the social message of Pope John Paul II. His teaching seems to fit right into my liberal background: I was a child of the Great Depression, and I will never forget how the New Deal saved my impoverished family from starvation in that dismal period. By 1948 I was serving on the committee in my Congressional District supporting Henry Wallace for President as candidate of the leftist Progressive Party. In 1972 Democrats Abroad offered me the chairmanship of its committee in Italy, to support the presidential candidacy of the ultra-liberal George McGovern, and I would have accepted except for a conflict of interest. I am still an active member of Democrats Abroad. It has surprised some fellow liberals that, with my political orientation, I could be such an enthusiast for the present Pope. Yet to me it is a totally consistent position.

It is not that I am trying to pin the “liberal” label on this Pope; his teachings transcend political ideologies. But I am saying that liberals can find not only a vast area of agreement but also a badly needed sense of direction in John Paul’s social message.

Admittedly, I often am disturbed that so many liberals — usually blinded by rage at the Holy Father’s stand on abortion and women’s ordination — consider John Paul their ideological enemy. I have heard them call him an “archconservative,” a “reactionary,” a “misogynist,” and even a “fundamentalist.” And this about the one who enunciates liberal ideals as forcefully and courageously as any public figure of our time.

In this era when in the business world “downsizing,” a gentle synonym for firing people, is praised as a vital technique for making our economy “competitive,” it is refreshing to hear the Pope come out loud and clear for giving employment priority over profits. At the beginning of this year, AT&T announced it was firing 40,000 workers — and that move was applauded by the entire financial community, with AT&T stock soaring on Wall Street. That was only one example of downsizing that you read of almost daily on the financial pages, with very little said about what happens to those workers who are losing their means of livelihood.

Pope John Paul pulls no punches in condemning this crass treatment of working people. It made my liberal heart throb last year when, during a tour of southern Italy where unemployment stands at 20 percent, the Pope denounced the “logic of capitalism” which calls for “the subordination of labor to profit.” Any true liberal should have cheered when the Holy Father in that same speech loudly attacked the habit of “treating workers as merchandise and considering man as an instrument of production.” This Pope teaches that employment with a living wage is a fundamental human right, not a gift granted only when the employer chooses. In his great encyclical Laborem Exercens he calls the “plague” of unemployment “a violation of the dignity of human labor” because it leads to “the devaluing of labor and its rights…especially the right to a just wage, to the security of the person and the family of the worker.” Could those be the words of an “archconservative”?

It makes me feel I am back in the generation of Hubert Humphrey when the Pope ticks off those fundamental rights of the working man — the right not only to a job but also to low-cost health care, paid vacations, pensions. To the Holy Father, workers have a full right to organize in labor unions and the right to strike “without the threat of penal sanctions against them for participating in the strike.” Nor does the Pope forget the rights of the handicapped. In Laborem Exercens John Paul demands that “work be offered to handicapped persons, according to their possibilities…. Each community will know how to create the structures needed to…create jobs for such persons.”

The Holy Father struck a sensitive nerve last October in Giants’ Stadium when he took a stand on immigration which put him at the opposite pole from most right-wingers on this issue. He quoted that celebrated poem on the Statue of Liberty (“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me”) as “an enduring witness to the American tradition of welcoming the stranger.” Then he said that the U.S. is called, “today as before,” to be a “hospitable society, a welcoming culture.” The Pope puts emigration in the category of human rights. In Laborem Exercens he declared that “man has the right to leave his own country of origin…to seek better living conditions in another country.” He warned sternly that “emigration for work must not be an occasion for financial or social exploitation.” And he called for legislation to protect the working immigrant against discrimination and exploitation. No true liberal could disagree with that.

Last September at the Beijing Conference on women’s rights, that veteran fighter for feminism, ex-Congresswoman Bella Abzug, referred to Pope John Paul as “one of the worst misogynists in history.” At least, she told an Italian journalist, he had been one until his recent letter apologizing to women for the way they had been treated in the past. Abzug’s epithet was mild compared to some of the things I have heard the Pope called by feminists, most of the time blinded by furious anger at John Paul’s clear confirmations of the Church’s inability to ordain women. I don’t believe any group has attacked the Pope so passionately and on such a scale as have the feminists.

So how does a liberal answer them? I would reply that they are wrong, that no Pope in history ever has given such consistent and explicit support to women’s rights as has John Paul II. In his encyclical Mulieris Dignitatem, he spelled out a theological basis for feminine rights, and in his Letter to Women of last June he put it into practical, concrete terms. In the months before the Beijing conference, he devoted a long series of Angelus speeches to the subject. And how many times since the beginning of his reign has he included women’s rights within the framework of human rights in general!

The publicity given to the Beijing Conference helped to put the media spotlight on John Paul’s profeminist stance, and at least some liberals began to understand that female ordination is not the touchstone of commitment to women’s rights. In the Pope’s Letter to Women, he spoke of “women often being relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude,” and he added an apology: “if objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry.”

Even the Bella Abzugs of this world should be happy when the Pope declares (in Mulieris Dignitatem), “Woman cannot become ‘object’ of male ‘domination’ or ‘possession.'” Speaking to a General Audience back in 1980, John Paul created a media sensation by declaring that a husband can commit adultery with his own wife — if he views her only as an object of physical pleasure, as a “sex object.” This Pope has been in the vanguard of those protesting against treating women as sex objects and against all forms of sexual molestation — and violence. As he wrote in the Letter to Women: “How many women have been and continue to be valued more for their physical appearance than for their skill, their professionalism, their intellectual abilities, their deep sensitivity…!”

The Pope has given full support to equal rights for women. He wrote in the Letter to Women, “there is an urgent need to achieve real equality in every area — equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancement, equality of spouses with regard to family rights….” And for women who opt exclusively for the role of motherhood, John Paul calls (in Laborem Exercens) for monthly cash payments to those women. How’s that for a hard-hitting liberal agenda for women’s rights?

Now let’s move on to another issue in which liberals have been deeply involved, the struggle against anti-Semitism. As in the case of feminism, John Paul has been assailed as unfriendly to the Jews, almost an anti-Semite. As recently as 1987, Jewish leaders threatened to boycott a scheduled meeting with the Pope in Miami, largely because the Vatican had not recognized Israel. That same year I saw massive anti-papal demonstrations by Jews and their friends in front of St. Peter’s, protesting John Paul’s receiving in private audience then-President of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, who was under fire because of his alleged activities in Hitler’s armed forces. There were also loud attacks on the Pope in 1982 for meeting with P.L.O. leader Yasser Arafat shortly after Arab terrorists had bombed the Rome Synagogue, killing a two-year-old boy and wounding 36 persons.

After all that, last October the Pope had almost a love-feast with Jewish leaders during his American visit. Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor told the press that John Paul “is the best friend we have had in that office [the papacy].” It was a totally different atmosphere from that 1987 visit.

Over the years an awareness has slowly emerged of this Pope’s warm feelings for “our Elder Brothers,” as he calls the Jewish people. In 1982 John Paul became the first Pope ever to visit a synagogue, where he prayed and recited Psalms with the Jewish congregation in Rome — and apologized for the wrongs committed against the Jews in centuries past. It was because of this Polish Pope that in April 1994, on a stage inside the Vatican, the candles of the Menorah were lit by a survivor of the Holocaust and the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, was recited in a ceremony commemorating the Holocaust. This took place in the Vatican’s Paul VI auditorium, where the Pope sat beside Rome’s Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff to hear a concert conducted by an American Jewish musician, all organized to commemorate the Holocaust. It was an unprecedented gesture by a Pope to the Jewish people. Most important of all, John Paul became the first Pope formally to recognize Israel and to establish diplomatic relations with that state — and without forgetting the plight of the Palestinians. The Pope has consistently supported the right of Palestinians to a state of their own, another point of agreement with good liberals.

And take a look at John Paul’s liberal stance on aid to the Third World. While so many governments in the developed world are cutting back on financial assistance to impoverished states, this Pope has consistently called for increasing that aid. Even here it is surprising how his position is often misunderstood. Last January Time magazine published a letter from a reader complaining about John Paul’s alleged indifference to Africans. The reader asked: “Has the Pope ever seen the blank expressions on the faces of the uneducated and unemployed of Africa?” In fact, this peripatetic Pope probably has seen more African faces than any other public figure from the developed world in his generation. He made 11 trips to black Africa in 15 years, and mingled with the impoverished throngs there and studied their needs firsthand. When the West became excited about helping the ex-Communist countries after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was for Pope John Paul to remind the world that, though an East-West problem existed, there still was a North-South problem. While in Africa in September 1995, he bitterly attacked the international community for its indifference, saying that it is “guilty because much can be done for Africa, there are many possibilities.”

At the Pope’s suggestion and under his supervision, the Vatican issued a document in 1984 on liberation theology, complaining that “the gap between the greater part of the rich countries and the poorest countries does not diminish or even level off, but always widens.” The same document reminded the leaders of the developed world that:

The Holy See never has ceased to denounce the scandal of the gigantic arms race which, apart from the threat to peace derived from it, consumes enormous sums of wealth, of which only a small part would be sufficient to meet the most urgent necessities of those populations deprived of basic needs.

In December 1995 I had the chance to witness the Pope personally point an accusing finger at Americans for our indifference to impoverished people. There were five of us from Time magazine in a private meeting with John Paul, and he wagged his cane (which he carried at the time because of his broken thigh, but which he used more for gesturing than for support) as he said: “You Americans live too well, you live too well! You live up here” — and he made a line through the air above his head — “while so many others live down here!” — and he drew another line at the level of his knees. He sounded like an old liberal one-worlder!

The Pope’s views coincide almost perfectly with liberal thinking on the death penalty, the environment, and war. While conservative “law and order” advocates clamor for ever more severe treatment of criminals, John Paul — in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae — refers to “the problem” of the death penalty: “There is a growing tendency, both in the Church and in civil society, to demand that it be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely,” adding that “punishment…ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity….”

Liberals should be delighted with the papal stand on protecting the environment. In Evangelium Vitae he declares that “man has a specific responsibility regarding the environment of life,” and adds that “in front of visible nature, we are subject to laws not only biological but also moral, which cannot be transgressed with impunity.” He complains of “sowing the seeds of death produced by the unconsidered upsetting of the ecological equilibrium.”

The Pope is no pacifist, but he insists that war be a very last resort and that it qualify in the Augustinian definition as a “just war.” When so many Americans were draping the American flag over their altars during the Gulf War, John Paul was insisting that peaceful negotiations still could solve the problem — and I, an old Middle East hand, agreed fully with him. The Pope wants an end to nuclear tests and a ban on nuclear war, and he has called on scientists of the world to refuse to do research aimed at producing ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction. A good liberal platform!

When John Paul visited the U.S. last October, he created a sensation with his seemingly “liberal” utterances on social ethics, even though he had been saying those things during all the 17 years he had occupied the See of Peter. The Washington Post carried a typical reaction, attributed to the Rev. Thomas Reese of Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University:

What I find striking is that this is a man normally categorized as a conservative, and yet he is saying things to the American people that no liberal Democrat would have the guts to say, namely that we should be welcoming to immigrants and that we should care for the poor both in this country and the world.

Some even went so far as to see the Pope supporting Clinton against Gingrich and Dole. Writing from New York in the International Herald Tribune, Arturo Zampaglione commented that the Pontiff has “lined up on the side of the Democratic White House on two burning questions on which he [Clinton] is locked in a struggle with the Republican Congress — immigration and welfare.”

Newsmen again and again put the question to papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls: “Has the Pope changed?” Joaquin’s answer was an unqualified “No.” The Pope has not changed. I personally can vouch for that; as a correspondent for Time magazine, I flew with John Paul to the U.S. in 1979 on his first American visit. During that trip, he preached the same social ethics as he did last October, but most of the media didn’t notice because they were so exercised about his strong affirmation of the Church’s stance on birth control, abortion, and divorce.

Many liberals choose to regard this Pope as “ideologically schizophrenic” — liberal on social issues but conservative on doctrine. Pope John Paul certainly would not agree. It is his liberal critics who are inconsistent, not the Pope. He told our Time magazine team that he had one and the same basis for both “my teaching on social ethics and my teaching on personal morality.” He had explained that basis to me in a conversation about a year before my conversion to Catholicism:

We emphasize the transcendental worth of the human person…. We insist that the human person must never be treated as an object; he must always be considered the subject. That is the basis for our teaching, the absolute standard.

This is the basis for the Pope’s stand against abortion and in favor of medical insurance for workers, against divorce and in favor of cash assistance to needy mothers, against permissive sex and in favor of giving employment priority over profits. This absolute standard offers liberals an ideological rudder which they badly need and which is truly consistent with their basic ideals. The Pope’s ethical standard is remarkably close to that proclaimed by Thomas Jefferson — whom I consider the Father of American liberalism — that “all men are created equal.” The Pope made an almost identical declaration in Evangelium Vitae when he said, “every innocent human being is absolutely equal to all others.”

The trouble is that the liberals, not the Pope, have become ideologically schizophrenic in not going all the way with Jefferson. They agree with the Pope in “defending the weak against the strong” — the worker against oppression, the immigrant against exploitation, the child against hunger and abuse — but only up to a point. Most liberals of our time refuse to go back to that moment when all men are created, which obviously is the moment of conception. Yet it is they who apply their litmus test of abortion to the Pope and proclaim him a conservative.

At least in part, it is this schizophrenia that has made liberals often appear lost and without direction in the recent decades. They badly need a compass to help them again get their bearings. Acceptance of the absolute value of human life — in its entirety — as their ideological standard would bring them back fully to their original Jeffersonian ideals. They would become defenders not only of the poor but also of the unborn child, who has been created with rights equal to all others. They would defend the right of the child to grow up in a home in which both parents are present, and would reject the culture of easy divorce and permissive sex which so often denies the child this fundamental right. They would reject the offense to human dignity posed by the use of “human material” in laboratory research. They would protect the human person against being treated as an “object” or “thing” in any situation. And in so doing, liberals just might realize that Pope John Paul II is an ideological friend instead of a reactionary foe.