HOLIER THAN THOU

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000202030037-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 18, 2010
• Sequence Number: 37
• Publication Date: December 25, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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.X ON PAGE!25 December 1984
". am not an apologist for this or any other adm i itstration.
By Wayne Barrett
l Archbishop John J. ' O'Connor has l
made God a registered Republican.
O'Connor registered as a Republican
himself in October 1980, just ? a month
before Ronald Reagan's first election, us
ing his sister's home in Pennsylvania as
his address. Checks with half a dozen
election boards in the cities where O'Con-
nor has lived and a protracted stirring of,
O'Connor's vague memory suggest that
the archbishop ' has, to the degree that
he's been registered at all, stuck with
God's Own Party since 1946. Two weeks,
after he caused such a fuss over Demo-
cratic vice-presidential candidate Geral-.
dine Ferraro's abortion position, he regis-
t4red in New York for. the first time and
changed his party affiliation' to
_ii dependent. {
Four days later Reagan dominated-a!
dinner that honors a Democratic gover-
nor buthas become a rich Republican
event. Sitting between Nancy and . Ron-?
aid Reagan was industrialist J. Peter
Grace,
the archdiocese's leading Catholic
layman, who is now spending nding millions on
the-baby-pays-for-the-deficit television
ads to publicize his own fanatical, bud-
get-bombing conservatism, A matter of
some recent controversy because o
corporate ties to a Nazi war cri in
his much publicized description of food Tis
stamps as'asic V a Puerto Rican
-
gram," Grace has lone been associated
with CIA-linked enterprises like Radio
Liberty, Radio Free Europe, an d the
agency's Latin American conduit Ameri-
can Institute for ree Labor Develop-
ment. Grace now chairs a commission-
t iF e p'resident's Private Sector Survey on
Cost Controls-that has undertaken
x-~-
what Reagan calls. "the largest effort of
its kind ever mounted to save tax dol-
i
On the Campaign Sail
'=The focus on the Ferraro flap has ob-
scured O'Connor's broader role in the na-
tional 'politics of 1984. In light of new
facts, that chronology merits a detailed
retelling:
0 O'Connor's mid-October timing
could not have been better for the Re-
publicans. A month earlier the archbish-
op'-had scheduled an October 15 major
address in New York, responding to Gov-
ernor Cuomo's Notre Dame speech and
entitled, "Human Lives, Human Rights."
He could not then have anticipated that!
Walter Mondale would at that same tine
decline his invitation to the annual Al
Smith dinner and ask that Ferraro sub-
stitute for him. In view of what O'Connor
had already said about Ferraro, it was. no
surprise that the archdiocese's dinner
committee declined to let her speak. The
two stories broke the same day: O'Connor
made his strongest antiabortion pitch
'ever (87 references to abortion and 32 to
the unborn in a 30-page speech) and the'
committee nixed Ferraro. Even the Post's
headline juxtaposition of the two events
was justifiable.
Next to the archbishop was Clare
Booth Luce, the matriarch of the Catho-
lic right wing in America, a former am-
bassador to Italy and a current member
of the presidents Foreign Intelligence'
Advisory Board, which oversees covert'
operations. Grace and Luce were mem
bers of a board chaired by O'Connor,
since 1982-the Pope"John Paul II Cen-
ter of Payerand Study for Peace. In
addition to such' rominnent' local'Demo-i
crats as the governor an the mayor
? O'Connor's head table also included cur-
rent director William Casey an for
mer reasu secretary William Simon,!
one of the leading forces in the current)
Catholic laymen's attack on the national'
bishops' progressive pastoral letter on the!
econom
"It's clearly a biased dinner," said
Democratic historian Arthur Schlesinger
Jr. "When Cardinal Cooke was there it
was a very nonpartisan thing. But Admi-
ral O'Connor is clearly a Reaganite and
he's trying to transform a fairly nonparti-
san event into a Reagan rally." In fact,
the dinner had become increasingly Re-
publican prior to O'Connor's arrival-
GOP gubernatorial candidate Lew Lehr-
man got top billing at the 1982 dinner-
i but the Ferraro rejection was the culmi-
Continued
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nation of a campaign season'f archdioce=.
san anti-Democratic abuse. The paradox
was that a dinner memona i2ingtthe first
Catholic presidential candidate may have
marked the last time, at least for the
immediate future, that this prochoice
party can afford to carry a Catholic tar-
get or. its national ticket.
C''Coimor's Commander,
in Chief :
In the final days of the presidential
campaign, a controversy arose over the
Reagan campaign attempt to get Catholic
newspapers across the country to print
an ad picturing the president and Pope
John Paul II shaking hands. At least 10
Catholic papers, including Catholic .New
York, the archdiocese's newspaper, re-
fused. The National Catholic News Ser-
vice called Archbishop John Foley, who
runs the Vatican office for social commu-
nications. Foley used to work for John I
Cardinal Krol, editing his diocesan news-,
paper. -Foley -did - riot mince -word's: M
said it was "not surprising" that the Rea -i
gan campaign was using the picture be-
cause the president has been "closely as-;
sociated" with Catholics.' But Foley did
not even stop there.
Also unnoticed was the coincidence of
the three events that dominated Catholic
news at the start of the year. On January 10 the White House formally announced
that it would seek full diplomatic rela-
tions with the Vatican, a papal goal for
decades. A little more than a week later,
Bernard Law was named the archbishop.
of Boston. By the end of the month, John
O'Connor was selected for New York
(and Timlin followed him in Scranton).
All three would hit the campaign trail for
the president. The man elevated to papal
legate as a result of the new diplomatic
relations between America and the Vati-
can, the pope's representative here, Arch-
bishop Pio Laghi, got himself embroiled
in a small controversy a few months later
when he took a $16,000 plane ride on the I
president, who'd summoned him in Au-
gust from Washington for a West Coast
meeting. Laghi took a 14-passenger C-20
gratis to the Virgin Islands after his visit
with the president. While these events
are cited ;got to suggest any crass quid
pro quo, they 'do cumulatively say some-
thing about the relationship of the pope
and the president.
As does a version of their relationship'
presented in a. recent book by Gordon
Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, a team
that has written nine. books with global
sags of 36 million copies. Their previous
book on John Paul, called Pontiff, was a
best-seller in 19 countries. But their sec-
ond book has gotten them in trouble. The
Amer ican version of Averting Armaged-
don is 140 pages shorter than the British
edition. One writer told the Intelligencer
column in New York magazine recently
that -Pressures were brought to bear on
the publisher by the State Department
and the ou e a denies it.
any event, the British version of the book
paints a picture of a -pope whose world
view both coincides with and is shaped
by the Reagan administration.
The book reaches back to the da s of
John XXIII who distanced the, a acy
rom its or
strai t e of anti- om
Lnunist American support an was there-
fore the victim of six CIA bugs planted in
the Vatican. The authors say that'John
Paul brought the agency back "in full
papal favour" and made it "the main
source' of secular intelligence." H, a gets
frequent CIA briefings CIA detectors }
geared to warn against any terrorist at-
tack' on the Vatican from the air, have
been installed on the roof of the papal
a artment. All the pope a it at
dinner is the. Soviet threat Security
agents provided by the CIA supposedly
accompanied the pope to Nicaragua,
where on the S9nflini bas The
CIA, through the American embassy
atsaw, kept John Paul informed of So-
viet reaction during his historic visit *o
Poland.
S "interviews that. the authors taped
with Reagan's emissary to the Vatican,
William Wilson, the ambassador points
to El Salvador, Asia, all "the trouble
spots" 'in ' the world; and says the pope
'has a hand in ail of them. Where does
Wilson 'detect differences between the
:-pope -and-the-b}:3.? `No conflict'at MW'
says Wilson. Any misunderstandings?
"None at all. We talk a lot to them. They
listen very carefully." Wilson admits, for.
"example, that he and the Reagan admin-
istration used "every avenue open to get
the pope to make the American bishops
realize what they were doing" on the nu
clear pastoral-namely, "leaving our'
country naked."
Wilson said be also pressured Bernar- j
din: "I exposed Bernardin to this admin-
istration's point of view. There is nothing
wrong with that." Right after Bernardin
met with the pope in January 1983, while
the committee was reviewing its second
draft, the pope met with Vice-President
George Bush. According to Thomas and
Continued
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ti
Witts, Bush. took with him "the pope's
personal view of the pastoral letter ,plus
an impression which allowed. the vice-
president to conclude that on all the im-
portant points in the administration's
disarmament policy," the pope and the
president.are"in accord."
The views that O'Connor began to_,
press on the committee in early 1983 f
were similar to the concerns of the Vati--
can and the European bishops. Any no-
first-use .,language was regarded -as. a
threat to NATO since U.S. policy has
long contemplated the use of nuclear,
weapons to respond to a conventional So-. j
viet attack on Europe. Thomas and Witts
claim to have seen detailed folders main-
tained ~
in the Vatican secretariat on
O'Connor's views and background, as
well as the other members of the nuclear
committee. According to Castelli's book,
the committee, and especially Bernardin,
were irked when they learned that
O'Connor had discussed the letter pri-
vately with the pope. O'Connor may have
gone further than the pope would have,
but his efforts to dilute the letter proba-
bly flowed from his best sense-of what his
own commander-in-chief wanted. Simi-
larly, he is closer to the pope's staunchly
anti-Communist line in Central America
than the U.S. bishops. Both have
wrapped themselves around Obando y
Bravo.
EXCERMEDI"
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