Cardinal George & Christendom.

Thanks to William Wood for taking on Cardinal Francis George ("Back to Christendom," June 17), and thanks to Cardinal George ("Correspondence," July 15) for offering a vigorous and civil response (although he could not help reminding readers that Wood is a graduate student). The cardinal is close to being the most influential Catholic in the country. That's a big job because, as he told Pope John Paul II, it is almost impossible to persuade Catholics to live the Christian life in the United States where antireligious cultural forces marginalize the church and its cardinals. Apparently, at the recent conclave, George learned that Western Europe is almost as bad.

Wood thinks that George is talking about politics, not religion. The cardinal and Paul Griffiths (July 15) deny the charge, but their letters simply confirm Wood's case. These Catholic leaders are talking about politics, Catholic politics, and their politics are, well, wrong. The cardinal is not the only selective "cafeteria Catholic" so enchanted by Benedict XV's peace plan and the Polish church's courageous resistance to communism that they believe the church of Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII, and the bishops of Europe actually offered a humane alternative to the bloody history of the twentieth century. Give us a break. This was a church that, in continental Europe, did all it could to undermine parliamentary democracy and never tired of blaming liberals, socialists, Jews, and Communists for every evil that arose. What's more, Catholic churchmen, clerical and lay, backed fascist regimes in Austria, Portugal, and Spain (where the bishops championed a "crusade" to overthrow the Republic), and later in Slovakia and Croatia. In France, the church badgered the Third Republic for two decades, then took no responsibility for their country's humiliation during World War II; many thought Vichy provided an opportunity for national renewal that would overcome secularism and restore the church to its deserved place of power and privilege. Shall we ask where the Vatican and the bishops were when Don Luigi Sturzo's Popular Party was sacrificed to Mussolini, or when the German Catholic Center Party, led by a priest, voted unanimously to confer dictatorial powers on Adolph Hitler? I leave it to others to wonder about the Holocaust and the war.

Griffiths suggests that Wood should see as the cardinal's preferred alternative to secularism not Christendom but "making the governing institutions" of Europe "more just, more capable of and interested in defending the weakest and most vulnerable, less interested in bloodshed and the reduction of the human to an instrument of production and consumption." Yet as James Youniss pointed out in a recent issue of America, Germany has achieved much of this even though its Catholics are not attending church in large numbers. In fact justice and peace in Europe owe much to Christian Democratic parties that shaped postwar governments, sometimes with the help of the church. But today's churchmen rarely celebrate those achievements, perhaps because the parties were far more independent than their prewar predecessors, and they seemed pretty secular. Worst of all, they achieved what they did by working closely with the once despised liberals and social democrats and, as a result, sometimes did not deliver what the church wanted. Parties and church drifted apart. Sadly the same process may be taking place in Eastern Europe as we speak.

Let's hope that fear of secularism and relativism will not lead Catholics to take the path that leads not to Christendom but to the self-righteous and irresponsible Catholic subculture too common in the years before Pope John XXIII. To his credit, George is prepared for argument, if not quite dialogue, about such questions. If we could incorporate such reflective exchanges into the life of our church, perhaps with God's help we can find a better way.

DAVID O'BRIEN

Worcester, Mass.