Basic HTML Version
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER 17, 1982
PAGE 9
implicated.)
Ernest Conine wondered about this in his December 13, 1982
column in the LOS ANGELES TIMES:
The continuing investigation into the attempted assassination of
Pope John Paul II is one of the great detective stories of�
century. Yet the dispatches from Rome are attracting surpris
ingly little interest and excitement either in the United States
or in Europe•.••
The obvious and rather terrifying implication of Soviet involve
ment was first suggested in September, in a Reader's Digest arti
cle by Clair Sterling and in an "NBC White Paper." Since then,
the finger of suspicion has come to point more credibly at the
Bulgarians, and therefore at the Russians.
Yet the stories from Rome are being played inside most news
papers. Aside from the NBC documentary, television hasn't paid
much attention. The general public doesn't seem terribly inter
ested, either. It seems that people just can't bring themselves
to take seriously the possibility that a government--even the
Soviet government--would knowingly countenance a plot to kill the
spi�itual leader of 580 million Roman Catholics••••
The Sofia government has indignantly denied Bulgarian involvement
in the attack on the Pope, branding such allegations a "nonsensi
cal and absurd campaign of slander••••"
As for the Soviet connection, it is much more tenuous••••It is
one thing to speculate that the Kremlin was angered enough to
kill by what it saw as the Polish Pope's role in encouraging the
emergence of the Solidarity free trade union movement in Poland.
It is quite another to prove it.
However, the Italian government is taking the Bulgarian connec
tion with the utmost seriousness. Otherwise it would not be in
viting a diplomatic crisis with the Sofia government, and perhaps
with Moscow as well, by pursuing the matter with such
determination.
In any event, honest skepticism does not seem to be the whole ex
planation for the ho-hum attitude toward the stories from Rome
••.•Maybe a lot of people have lost the capacity to be outraged
by anything••••Then there is the strange double standard of many
European socialists and American liberals toward misdeeds, real
or suspected by the Soviet Union. They always seem to feel that
to accuse the Kremlin of wrongdoing is somehow to make excuses
for excesses committed by our own government or secret services.
It is safe to say that, if the Italian police had uncovered a
smidgin of unverified evidence of American CIA involvement in the
shooting of the Pope, the U.S. and European presses would be full
of big black headlines and hysterical editorials of condemnation.
Whatever the explanation, the Italian authorities--while bending
over backward to avoid any official suggestion that either the
Bulgarian or Soviet government was directly involved in the