Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Who needs divisions when you've got missiles?

Last week we weren't blogging because we were travelling a lot. This week the problem is that the tide of drivel being said and written about the Pope has sucked the life out of other potential topics. At least Tuesday brought some signs of more sober assessments; check out this Thomas "how the Irish saved civilization" Cahill piece in the NYT, and the GUBU blog's excerpt from a critical Irish Times article. If we were to identify a single problem with the papal hagiography, it's in the presumption that he be assessed as a politician, which is what the attribution of the fall of Communism to him implies.

Of course it's historically valid to note his role in galvanizing the Polish opposition. But he's the Pope; of all Catholics, he's the one closest to God. So we have the same problem as with Dubya's line about God wanting everyone to be free: where was He before 1979? Where was He during World War II, with his then apostle Pius XII? If the standard for Popes is standing up to totalitarianism, then wasn't Pius XII a colossal failure?

Which brings us to an opinion piece by George Melloan in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd), who makes the astonishing factual claim (citing a Fox News interview as the source), that the Pope was in fact another player in the Cold War game:

[former US] Ambassador [to the Vatican, Jim] Nicholson, now U.S. secretary for Veterans Affairs, revealed on Fox News Sunday that John Paul worked closely with President Ronald Reagan in those dark days of the early 1980s, when the Soviets were threatening an invasion of Poland. The U.S. and the Vatican shared intelligence about Soviet troop movements and the pope supported the deployment of U.S. cruise missiles in Europe, controversial at the time, to counter the Soviet threat.

It seems to be par for the course now in the US media that one can simply assert facts like this unusual claim that the Pope supported cruise missiles and not be challenged. If true, it would explain JP2's effectiveness relative to Pius XII -- the latter had no military alliances to fall back on. But where's the evidence? The best we could do with Google (which is more than Melloan seems to have done) is track down this article from Vast Rightwing Conspiracy outlet The Washington Times, which to its credit is more careful about hedging its bets on a similar claim:

... the pope was shown satellite photos of Soviet SS20 missiles aimed at targets in Italy and other key European cities. This helped the pope understand the threat from Moscow's medium-range missiles, and as a result -- the sources claim -- the Vatican, normally a strong critic of weapons proliferation, did not add its voice to the chorus of European opposition to the deployment of U.S. medium-range Cruise and Pershing missiles.

So here it's correctly designated as a claim, not a fact, and the Pope's support for cruise missiles is more of a strategic silence. But now that he's dead, it seems, all the doubts disappear. While no JP2 article is complete without a reference to Stalin's aphorism "How many divisions does he have?," the Pope's new boosters don't see it as a rhetorical question. At the very least, he had the Knights Reagan and Bush.

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