Keys of This Blood by Malachi Martin Page A

social conditions in the world. The kind of truth that would help free those citizens from the darksome toils of the Big Lie foisted on them by the Party-State.
    John Paul achieved some remarkable successes in the dynamic pursuit of his independent policies to sow the seeds of sociocultural change in the geopolitical soil of the East. Indeed, his assault on the Soviet monolith was key to the 1989 liberation of the Eastern European states. Andby 1990—almost overnight, as it seemed to the inattentive—whole blocs of Russian believers voted themselves and their church property back into the Roman Catholic fold.
    Nevertheless, this was not a pope for halfhearted ventures, nor for half an international policy. His end run around Soviet officialdom was not a religious gambit, but a geopolitical strategy, and it was therefore joined to a twin policy toward the West. His concern, in other words, was not only to produce a change in the policies of what Cardinal Wyszynski had always called the Red
Internationale
of the USSR. At least as much of his attention, and a great deal more of his physical energy, was devoted to a change in the increasingly materialist, antiChurch and anti-God stance of the Golden
Internationale
of the Western capitalist nations.
    It was significant in that regard that the Solidarity experiment with which the Pontiff was so deeply involved in his Polish homeland would quickly fire the popular imagination, and the deep concern of all truly democratic minds, in the Western nations. But the deepest and broadest effects of John Paul’s policies were produced in the West as a direct consequence of his crisscrossing lines of world travel. By those travels he achieved a high international profile; he made his ideas current coinage among world leaders; and in countries that were battlegrounds between East and West, he was able to juxtapose those ideas persuasively with Leninist-Marxist ideas. Within a brief time, it became so clear that Pope John Paul had taken his due place among the nations’ leaders that—after over a hundred years of an attitude that passed for a policy, an attitude regarded by some as “Hands off this political hot potato”—even the United States reestablished formal diplomatic relations between Washington and the Vatican.
    At the same time he was making such geopolitical headway, however—and despite urgent advice from some of his most trusted and certainly his most loyal advisers, as well as a mounting cry of anguish from ordinary believers who were subjected to extraordinary displays of un-Catholicity among bishops, clergy and religious around the world—the Pontiff neglected almost totally what many argued was his primary problem and responsibility. He put off indefinitely any attempt to reform his own Church, or even to arrest the accelerating deterioration of its universal integrity.
    The surprising thing was that this was not negligence in office occasioned by the heat of his geopolitical agenda. As in the case of his choice not to abrogate the Vatican’s formal
Ostpolitik
, it was a conscious decision on the Pontiff’s part. As early as 1980, in fact, John Paul was frankin declaring that a reform of his rapidly deteriorating Church—or even an attempt to arrest that deterioration—was an impossibility at that stage of his pontificate. In his gradation of papal values, the geopolitics of power took precedence over the geopolitics of faith. Reform of his churchly institution would he vehicled on the global change he was pursuing with such intelligence and vigor.
    That was essentially the agenda and the climate in Pope John Paul II’s Vatican for the first two and a half years of his pontificate. As revolutionary as his geopolitical vision was, it was keyed to and gridded upon nothing more astounding than an educated understanding of human affairs. Like the Wise Men of the West, in a certain sense he took time for granted. He