My purpose in presenting this brief discussion of selected foreign policy initiatives of the Vatican is to show the lengths to which "defenders of the Church" in the Reagan administration are willing to go in order to "safeguard" the Church. To these "defenders," Vietnam, El Salvador, Grenada, and Lebanon are viewed in part as "holy wars for the preservation of the Church."

From- ........... AMERICAN DEMOCRACY & THE VATICAN:

By Dr. [Phd.] Stephen Mumford

INFLUENCE OF THE CATHOLIC HIERARCHY ON GOVERNMENT POLICY

page 173-174

For creating the Office of Strategic Services [OSS], the wartime predecessor to the CIA, and this special arrangement with the Vatican,

Donovan did more to safeguard and champion the [Roman Catholic] Church than any other American, and he was rewarded for his services with the highest [Roman] Catholic award ever received by an American. No doubt, thousands of others have striven with their deeds for similar recognition.

What has this meant in terms of the issues cited in Table 1 ?

Communism is the greatest threat faced by the [Roman Catholic] Church. The Catholic Church and communism cannot coexist. They are both rival absolutists. Both indoctrinate their children so as to ensure complete rejection of the other.

Columnist Robert Blair Kaiser who covered the Vatican for Time magazine had a conversation with Pope John XXIII in August 1962.

This holy war continues in Central America today!

It is believed by some historians that the reason the Vatican aided Hitler in his rise to power was so that he could destroy Russian communism. When this failed, the Vatican through its defenders called upon the United States to stop the spread of Russian communism in Europe and elsewhere.

A Vatican-inspired hate campaign against the Russians, the greatest hate campaign ever endured by Americans, was launched. To this day, like most other Americans, I am a victim of this campaign launched during my childhood.

In August 1984, President Reagan showed his intense hatred of the Russian people in his infamous radio microphone test,

No doubt, this Vatican-inspired hate campaign has influenced Mr. Reagan.

By this theory, at a cost of hundreds of billions of American dollars, we built a war machine for the protection of [Roman] Catholicism. For this same reason have we built a nuclear arsenal powerful enough to destroy the world five times over and have we seen the Russians match it? This is, I feel, in great part the origin of the other great threat to civilization - nuclear war.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to protect [Roman] Catholicism from communism, and one can only conjecture about the ways in which the world would have been different if this money had been spent differently and if the first requests to the World Health Organization by India for population growth control assistance had not been blocked by the Vatican thirty-four years ago.

Our commitment to saving the [Roman] Catholic govemment in South Vietnam from communism [only 5 percent of the people of South Vietnam were Catholic,14 causing some observers to refer to it as a Vatican colony] can be thought of as a result of the activities of the "U.S. Catholic defenders of the Church," largely members of the CIA.

The French provided this same service to the Vatican for eighty years before they gave up on the holy war in Vietnam.15

A number of issues cited in Table I, including U.S. military support for El Salvador and other Central American govemments, the Grenada invasion, and maintaining the status quo in Latin America can be seen as Vatican-inspired actions to prop up Catholic [Vatican-dominated] governments against popular uprisings. They are the "holy wars against communism" mentioned by Pope John XXIII.

During a May 1984 fundraising visit to New York, the archbishop of Managua, Nicaragua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, said his campaign represented the best-organized opposition in Nicaragua to popular Sandinista government efforts.16

Another example is Lebanon.

Most Americans are not aware of the closeness of the Gemayel govemment to the Vatican. "Maronite Christians," a minority group in Lebanon, are the Eastern Catholic Church.

Gemayel, like his politician father, was Jesuit trained in a Catholic university.18 The Vatican wishes to see the Maronites continue to be the dominant power in Lebanon so that the only country in the Middle East in the Vatican sphere of influence will remain so.

In all of these cases the Vatican, to maintain and expand its geographical control, seems to be calling upon the services of the U.S. Defense Department to serve as an instrument of Vatican foreign policy in much the same way it has in Cold War Europe.

My purpose in presenting this brief discussion of selected foreign policy initiatives of the Vatican is to show the lengths to which "defenders of the Church" in the Reagan administration are willing to go in order to "safeguard" the Church.

To these "defenders," Vietnam, El Salvador, Grenada, and Lebanon are viewed in part as "holy wars for the preservation of the [Roman Catholic] Church."

They are unquestionably willing to go to similar lengths to protect the Church from population growth control activities.

Population scientists, field workers, and, more impurtantly, journalists must acknowledge the magnitude of this obstacle to solving the population problem and deal with this problem in its entirety - and without delay.

WHEN DID THE GOAL OF "AMERICAN" FOREIGN POLICY BECOME

WHEREAS THE PAPAL IDEAL IS THE LORDSHIP OF THE POPE.

By Dr. [Phd.] Stephen Mumford

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 84-72500

Pub.by- Humanist Press PO Box 146 Amherst, NY

Available [about $10] from-

Center for Research on Population and Security

PO Box 13067

Research Triangle Park, NC 27709