As I slowly progress through the book His Holiness, a work on the life and times of Pope John Paul II, I am now in Christmastide 1981-82, where the Pope's Fatherland, Poland, is under martial law due to social unrest against the ruling Communist regime.
Tensions are riding high. The commander of the Polish Army, Wojciech Jaruzelski, is under pressure to bring the population under control for fear of a Soviet invasion, which he knows would devastate the country. Solidarity, the national laborers' union responsible for the strikes which precipitated the harsh military crackdown, is trying to hold tough on its demands and principles.
They find help and support from the Catholic Church and the Pope, but the Church is being careful. It doesn't want to apply so much pressure so as to cause the Polish Communist government to fold and invite a Soviet takeover, but neither does the Church wish the Communist government to continue to repress the common people and their deeply held Christianity.
The hero of our story, the Pope, is under intense pressure. He knows that Communism is evil. He knows that it is opposed to the Church's mission and to the Gospel. He knows that he, as the head of the Church, must stand firm against it, but he's in a tight spot.
Who comes to his aid at this time? Who comes to the Vatican during the spring of 1982 and has a fifty minute talk with His Holiness about the struggle against Communism? None other than the American president, Ronald Reagan.
Reagan has no convincing political or financial reason to have close ties with the Pope. He is not Catholic himself, though his abusive father was [Reagan's Christianity came from his Disciples of Christ mother]. The Catholic Church is in decline in the West, thought to be an obsolete medieval relic destined to fall to the forces of Reason and Science and Modernity, though the Church remains strong in the Communist bloc and in the Third World.
What do these two men discuss? In spite of the difficulties in Poland and in spite of the apparent invincibility of the USSR, Reagan tells the Pope that Communism is destined to fail, because it is spiritually bankrupt. Its inherent evil will destroy it from within as first the people rise up against it, and then the leaders follow suit. The Pope, a man rightfully skeptical of American aims and ideals [which he views as too materialistic, violent and amoral] finds in Reagan an ally, and more than an ally, a brother in Christ.
The Pope agrees that Communism, with its wanton disregard for the rights and dignity of man, was destined to fail. All he and Reagan needed to do was give it a push, and the rotten tree would fall of its own accord.
To the Pope's surprise, he found that the American president agreed with him on the question of nuclear weapons. Though Reagan was in the beginning stages of ordering a great arms buildup, he persuaded the Pope that he believed in nuclear disarmament. Reagan's hatred of nuclear weapons was unknown to the popular press [the Usual Suspects] but his aides and close confidants say that his hatred of nukes was authentic. Peggy Noonan confirms it in her biography of Reagan, When Character Was King. There's even an entire book about it titled Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons by Paul Lettow.
One of the authors of His Holiness is one Carl Bernstein, noted liberal journalist not known for his soft treatment of Republican presidents. If he passes along such information about President Reagan's disarmament views, I accept the story as true.
Reagan and the Pope's confidence that they would prevail over the Communist menace was bolstered by a shared experience: failed assassination attempts. Within six weeks of each other, in 1981, both Reagan and the Pope were targeted by assassins, and in both instances, the bullet missed vital areas by a whisker. Reagan confided in the Pope that be believed God had spared him because God had a Divine Mission for him to fulfill, a Mission that included helping the Holy Father in Rome defeat Communism. The Pope had a similar sense of Divine direction in his own life. The two men would continue to share a special bond and relationship.
The next day, after his private meeting with John Paul, Reagan was in London where he informed the world that the Soviet Union was in the midst of a "great revolutionary crisis" of which Poland was a sign. The implication was that the Soviet Union itself would soon find itself in the same situation as Poland--close to the brink of collapse.
By calling out Communism as the evil it truly was, and declaring it defeated by history, he was destroying the fear of Communism that had, until that time, paralyzed the West and kept it in a perpetual struggle against Communism, which only by complete coincidence greatly enriched the arms industry and international banking cartel.
Why do these thirty year old stories of men now long gone matter to us? We can be confident, as they were confident, that Evil will defeat itself. The Kingdom of this World will become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. The bad guys' clock is ticking. The good people of the world, wherever they are found, are getting it. Occupy Wall Street is one sign, as is the support for Ron Paul, though both of these movements have their flaws and limitations [who among us has perfect vision of all things?] To a minor extent, the Tea Party was a sign that lots of people were waking up, until it was co-opted by the Usual Suspects.
The world bankers, Wall Street frauds, CIA spooks and police state goons will lose; they are even now losing. Their plans will fall through. Their rule will soon end. We may see the end in our lifetimes or we may not: it took time for Communism to fall. Either way, we know the days of the bad guys are numbered. Why should we fear? We may face them down with Divinely-inspired confidence.
In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. --St. John xvi:33
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