Basic HTML Version
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 11, 1984
PAGE 13
gram called THE BLACK CHANNEL rails at the supposed failings of
capitalism. "Any time any of us used to hear THE BLACK CHANNEL,"
relates the East German truck driver, "we would have a race to
the TV to see who could turn it off first."
As the Pope Takes His 21st Foreign Trip••.
"A new Era of Papal Diplomacy" is the way the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
heralded the last globe-trotting trip by Pope John Paul II, this time to
Asia. According to the author, Dan Schanche (of the LOS ANGELES TIMES SER
VICE), the current pontiff has become "a truly universal pope":
As Pope John Paul II embarked Wednesday on his 21st papal trip
abroad, some church scholars say his often-eriticized foreign
travel has wrought an epochal change in the development of�
Roman Catholic Church, one that no future pontiff can likely put
aside. "After
ill
centuries he has catapulted the church out of
Rome and out of Italy," sai? an approving churchman who only a
year ago was sharply erit1cal of what he saw then as the
pontiff's dangerous and costly globetrotting.
Joh� Paul left Wednesday on an 11-day journey to South Korea,
Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Thailand. His route
took him westward around the world, beginning with a brief
meeting in Fairbanks, Alaska, with President Ronald Reagan, who
was en route home from China. In all, the pope will cover more
than 24,000 miles (38,700 kilometers), visit 11 places in five
countries, celebrate nine Masses and deliver 40 speeches. This
is a more demanding schedule and in some respects as exhausting
and controversial as his trip to Central America and Haiti 14
months ago.
At that time a number of clerics here criticized the pope's seem
ing wanderlust, many because the travel appeared to distract him
from urgent administrative matters.... Today there are fewer
eritics. Many churchmen agree that this is because they now
understand why the pontiff is compelled to visit far-off places
and what the church gains from having such a peripatetic pope.
"He is going where the ferment is, where the church still means
something and is going somewhere, growing," said a church
scholar, a former critic of papal travel. "Christianity has lost
much of its vitality in the traditional Catholic heartland of
Italy and the rest of Europe, but it is a vital, going concern in
places like Africa, Latin America and Asia, even in countries
where Christians are small minorities." He pointed out that the
church was growing more rapidly in Asia and Africa than in any of
the Western countries, citing India, which the pope has not yet
visited, as having more Roman Catholics than both Irelands.
A Vatican diplomat who has watched John Paul develop in the past
five and one-half years into what he called "� truly universal
�," said: "I think he sees America and Europe as having taken
the wrong turn, with both capitalist and Marxist materialism
stultifying religion, while the Third World, even forgotten
places like New Guinea and the Solomons, represents the new front
line of the church."