Si to a Demanding Friend

By Richard N. Ostling

Facing 40,000 roaring youths at a Caracas stadium last week, Pope John Paul II asked, "Will Venezuela's youth have the valor to be true Christians?" The crowd shouted, "Si." "And will they have the valor to construct a more just society?" Again a thundering "Si." "More fraternal and more peaceful?" Once more a booming affirmation.

The incident typified the rousing reception accorded the Pope during the first phase of his twelve-day Latin American tour. The exchange, however, underscored a more important matter: John Paul was not just a barnstorming superstar generating good cheer, but a taskmaster issuing challenge upon challenge. When chants broke out in the stadium proclaiming the Pope to be Venezuela's friend, he ad-libbed, "Yes, I am your friend. Yes, I am a demanding friend."

To dispel any lingering doubts about his rigorous stance, the touring Pontiff stressed again and again the need for a disciplined church that is attentive to official teaching. To an audience of 400,000 in Caracas he issued another in his series of traditionalist condemnations of birth control, abortion, euthanasia and illicit sex. The morning after saying Mass in Maracaibo, he moved on to Merida, where he urged a throng to accept church teachings "with meekness" and not to be "dragged away by ideologies contrary to Catholic dogma."

That was a clear reference to the more militant and Marxistoriented strain of liberation theology, which emphasizes a class struggle that the church rejects. But as the week wore on, John Paul also proclaimed his own version of liberation theology for South Americans: an emphatic warning against placing too much importance on the material side of liberation, to the neglect of its spiritual aspects. Still, the Pope declared repeatedly that the struggle for social justice is an essential part of the church's work. At a complex of giant metalworks and mines in Ciudad Guayana, 300,000 people, many of them workers, greeted John Paul warmly when he said, "How long will the men of the Third World have to support unjustly the primacy of economic processes over inviolable human rights?" In Quito, Ecuador, he called for the "gradual disappearance of the intolerable abyss" between rich and poor, and appealed for land reform and medical and old-age protection for workers. At mountainous Latacunga, Ecuador, he met 250,000 members of deprived indigenous tribes, who greeted him with painted faces amid a din of pipes and drums. The Pope told them to oppose both the "unacceptable injustice" of their situation and the use of violence to bring social change.

At week's end John Paul landed in Peru, the birthplace of liberation theology. Speaking in Lima, he attacked radicals who seek to undercut the Catholic hierarchy, and urged priests and nuns to forsake "passing ideologies." After four days in Peru, John Paul was scheduled to touch down in Port-of-Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, before flying to Rome this week.

Among his most pressing tasks when he returns home: preparing for a two-week meeting, starting next November, of Roman Catholic bishops. The extraordinary synod will convene to examine the work of the Second Vatican Council, which made sweeping changes in church life. The mandate of the synod, says a Vatican theologian, will be "assessment and clarification" of the 1962-65 council, "not a correction or revision." No doubt, but the clarification is likely to be exactly in line with the Pope's summons to authority, discipline and orthodoxy.

With reporting by Roberto Suro, with the Pope