Politics and the Church

While never good bedfellows, there have been periods—certainly in recent American and history—when the Catholic Church has become much too closely identified with the policies of one political party or another, infecting the Church’s institutional integrity and ability to teach from her faith, and thereby partially reducing the potency of that faith among the faithful.

This tendency, and the wonderful relationship between President Reagan and Pope John Paul II which helped bring down communism, is touched upon in a recent review of the new book Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster, by George Weigel.

An excerpt.

“The new revelation about the relationship in the Andersons' book is that the Pope and the President had an extensive correspondence, involving dozens of letters back-and-forth, which Professor Martin Anderson told me were by far among the most interesting of all the Reagan letters he had examined. Among the letters referenced in Reagan's Secret War is a January 1982 letter from the White House to the Vatican in which Reagan shifted the subject of the exchange from events in Poland (which had just been put under martial law) to his hopes for genuine disarmament, not just arms "control," at the talks about to begin with the Soviet Union in Geneva.

“Indeed, the Andersons' book makes clear that, somewhat to the consternation of many of his close advisers, Ronald Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist: he really did believe, as he often said, in ridding the world of nuclear weapons. His instruments for doing so -- ramping up U.S. missile capability to demonstrate that America couldn't be outmuscled, and the strategic defense initiative as an insurance policy -- were bitterly criticized by the liberal arms controllers, whose influence on the deliberations of the U.S. bishops as they prepared their 1983 peace pastoral was, to put it gently, considerable. But as the Andersons demonstrate, it was Reagan who was the true radical in this business: the man who wasn't satisfied with simply managing an arms race, the man who wanted to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. Historians of U.S. Catholicism will thus be grateful to the Andersons for clarifying just how mistaken some of the policy assumptions underlying "The Challenge of Peace" were.”