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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, APRIL 27, 1984
PAGE 7
alleged, the Pope also always tells his listeners during his many overseas
tours "that Communism and the Soviet Union must be destroyed."
The Vatican took the unusual step of responding with an unsigned editorial
in the March 31 issue of L'OSSERVATORE ROMANO, the Vatican newspaper,
calling the criticism "not only absurd and trumped up, but also gravely
insulting.
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Peter Nichols, Rome correspondent for THE TIMES of London,
probed Moscow's growing anxiety with John Paul II in his paper's April 6
edition:
The Roman Catholic Church is treated worse in Czechoslovakia than
in any other Eastern European country, but that situation is not
sufficient to explain this blanket-barrage against the Pope which
is taken to emanate from Moscow as much as from Prague. Accord
ing to TRIBUNA, his speeches abroad are marked by "a policy of
restoration of old social orders," a policy which has as its
dominant theme � passionate anti-communism and visceral anti
Sovietism."•••
John Paul !I's attitudes could hardly be other than different to
those of his predecessors. More than a diplomatic plan, he has�
vision. He has repeatedly spoken� Europe as stretching to the
Urals. He sees his election as a sign that Eastern Europe must be
given its Just place as an integral p
1
ar { of Christian Europeand
not be treated simply as a painful dip omat1c question. He in
sists on common Christian roots and, added to this vision, is a
dream of reconciliation between Western Christianity and the
Eastern Orthodox churches.
Compared with his predecessors he is, in the words of a highly
placed prelate at the Vatican, "playing for much higher stakes,
and one result is that the Soviet leadership sees him as an
adversary." That would not have been said about a pope even in
private at any time in the last quarter of a century, any more
than the Czechoslovak attack would have been made during that
period. His attitude is seen, however, to reflect the current
state of relations between East and West. Who now sees hope for a
genuine understanding with the Soviet Union?
Does this adversary status mean that Moscow was behind the nearly
successful attempt on his life in St. Peter's Square on May 13,
1981? Some light will be shed on this mystery when the trial at
last takes place here of Serghei Antonov, the Bulgarian Airlines
official accused of helping Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish terror
ist, in the assassination plot....
The implicit danger is that if the attempt on the Pope's life was
really organized by the East, they will feel that they have to
try again. In the intervening three years his design has become
clearer. The Prague attack shows that he is regarded as a seri
ous danger. But it also bears out one of his great disappoint
ments. The Pope is often regarded as being too Polish in his
attitude towards the church internationally.
But his close
advisers point out that he is genuinely attached to the Slav
peoples as a whole: he is deeply moved
.QY
the Eastern liturgies.
He had hoped that, in some way, communism would change. Prague
underlines that it is showing no signs of doing so.