The Pope’s New Weapon

On a sunny afternoon last April I was leaning out a hotel window in Santiago, Chile, waiting for the Pope. A million other people were awaiting him too; in rows ten deep they lined the streets of a city that had been scrubbed and painted, and festooned with white-and-yellow papal banners. Armed guards patrolled the rooftops. A helicopter clattered noisily overhead.

When the Pope’s motorized glass bubble—papamobile, the Chileans called it—rounded the corner, the street seemed to erupt in a great cheer and a blizzard of confetti. But then, abruptly, almost in mid-breath, the thunderous cheers turned to boos and catcalls and whistles, for just behind the papamobile came a squat, ugly, armored car with a narrow slit window, and inside the armored car rode Gen. Augusto Pinochet, president of Chile.

I couldn’t help wondering what might be going through Pinochet’s mind: What’s the Pope’s secret? He just waves and the whole country goes into a swoon. The next night 80,000 Chilean teenagers filled a stadium to hear the Pope speak. A dark cloud of memory hung over the stadium, for in 1973 Pinochet had used it as a holding pen for dissidents. (Church-sponsored human rights groups estimate that 7,000 Chileans have been killed by government troops during Pinochet’s regime.) Sometimes, as a counterpoint to their adulation of the Pope, the teenagers broke out in spontaneous chants: “Go away, Pin-o-chet.”

“Love is stronger than hate,” the Pope kept saying. But hate has its champions in Chile as well. The night of the stadium rally I found myself in a student demonstration on Santiago’s main boulevard. It began as a simple holding-hands-we-shall-overcome-type of march. But when one of the crowd tossed a rock through a shop window, the sharp, percussive sound seemed to arouse a deep primordial mob instinct. Fires flared spontaneously in a dozen places, and the crowd began ripping up iron grillwork along the boulevard’s median strip.

Soon a dilapidated bus appeared, filled with soldiers. It zig-zagged toward the crowd, like a crazed lion plunging into a herd of wildebeests. The students scattered, then regrouped, then counterattacked. I heard the ugly thunk of rocks hitting metal, and more sounds of glass breaking, and then the wail of a siren.

The mood on the street seemed to be approaching a flashpoint until a huge vehicle shaped like a weird, ungainly insect arrived. It was the guanaco (named for a spitting llama), a water cannon, and the students knew it well. In what seemed like seconds they all melted into the darkness, and the boulevard was suddenly empty. I returned to my hotel and joined other guests gathered around a lobby television set, watching the Pope pray for peace.

International travel often brings unexpected ironies to light. A few days after the demonstration in Santiago, I was in downtown Lima, Peru, touring a rather somber historic building. A large upstairs room featured fancy tilework and an intricately carved mahogany ceiling, which the guidebook duly noted as “one of the finest examples of baroque in South America.” In the center of the room stood a cross, with a wooden head of Christ mounted on the top.

This was the Court of the Inquisition, a room used by the church to try accused heretics, from 1570 until 1820. After hearing testimony from masked accusers, the Inquisitors—dressed in costumes with an uncanny resemblance to Ku Klux Klan getups—would reach a verdict and announce it via the cross. Certain levers moved Jesus’ head up and down, signifying the defendant’s innocence. Other levers moved the head from side to side, a verdict that condemned the victim to punishment in the dungeonlike area beneath the courtroom.

Visitors can view in situ the various torture devices employed; dioramas downstairs re-create them with primitive realism. Dummy Inquisitors assiduously work over dummy victims, twisting piano wires into flesh, pouring water into nostrils, disarticulating limbs on a stretching rack. While examining the displays, I realized for the first time where some South American governments learned their trade.

The church, Catholic and Protestant, has experimented with various forms of power over the centuries. The power of brute force, such as that wielded in Lima’s Court of the Inquisition, imposed theological orthodoxy on a population for two-and-one-half centuries. It proved effective, but at great cost: The continent has not yet recovered from the assault on freedom and human dignity.

Leaders of that same church, most notably John Paul II, now seek a higher kind of power. I had seen this most strikingly from my hotel balcony in Santiago: Through sheer moral force, the Pope commanded more of Chile’s loyalty than did President Pinochet with all his vaunted power.

The juxtaposition of two images—the Pope praying for peace in Santiago, and the Inquisitors administering their truth-enforcers in Lima—brought to mind a passage from Scottish theologian George MacDonald. Why is God so restrained in the face of the world’s evil? wondered MacDonald. Why did Jesus Christ take such a passive role? This is what MacDonald concluded:

Instead of crushing the power of evil by divine force; instead of compelling justice and destroying the wicked; instead of making peace on the earth by the rule of a perfect prince; instead of gathering the children of Jerusalem under His wings—whether they would or not, and saving them from the horrors that anguished His prophetic soul—He let evil work its will while it lived; He contented himself with the slow unencouraging ways of help essential; making men good; casting out, not merely controlling Satan.… Throughout His life on earth, He resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good—strong, perhaps, when He saw old age and innocence and righteousness trodden under foot.

MacDonald concludes with a poignant reminder for the church: “To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it.”

Moral force, to be sure, is a risky form of power. Compared to the glaring reality of brute force, it may appear weak and ineffectual. But it has its own method of conquering. Perhaps if General Pinochet understood the distinction between the two kinds of power, he would know why the cheers in Santiago change to boos as his armored car appears.

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