Clash of the Religious Titans.

The Vatican has never been simply he religious headquarters of the Roman Catholic church. It has always been involved in politics to promote or defend its doctrines and institutions. In this effort, the Vatican has at times supported violent conflict while on other occasions stressed peace and tolerance. In recent years it has been troubled by the growth of the Islamic population in Europe, which some Catholic leaders call "a program of expansion and reconquest."

The National Catholic Reporter in October 1999 noted that, according to the United Nations, the Islamic population grew by more than 100 percent in Europe from 1989 to 1998 to fourteen million, while over the same period "the Muslim population in the United States grew by 25 percent to 4.9 million." Specifically, French Catholic leader Alain Besancon indicated that there are between four and five million Muslims in France--roughly the same as the number of practicing Catholics. Marseilles is expected to become the first city in Europe with a non-European majority.

These are not just theoretical concerns about the future. There have been violent clashes between Catholics and Muslims in the past, even though the Vatican kept a low profile and tried to involve other nations in diplomacy. One such clash occurred in Lebanon in the early 1970s when the Maronites--one of the major Christian groups in Lebanon, whose relation to the Vatican dates back to the period of the Crusades--contacted the Vatican to find out about possible training centers for Maronite militia in Europe. According to George E. Irani's 1986 book, The Papacy and the Middle East: The Role of the Holy See in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1962-1984:

   A secret military organization based in Rome sent experts who had previous
   experience in the wars of southern Sudan and Biafra.... These experts in
   guerilla warfare picked the best among Christian militias and sent them to
   the city of Anvers [Belgium] where they joined special training centers....
   [The Vatican] advised the Maronite monks to fund the training of the
   militias through the Phalangist Party.

The Vatican did not seek the defeat of the Muslims or other groups but involved the United States and France and initiated its own efforts with the fundamental objective "to save Lebanon as an independent state in order to protect the Christian presence not only in Lebanon but throughout the Middle East."

In Europe, the Vatican has for many years viewed Croatia as a Catholic bulwark against Muslims from the Middle East and against Soviet penetration from the east. When Croatia became part of Yugoslavia after World War I, Vatican policy changed after a decade to one of detaching Croatia and building it as a uniquely Catholic state hostile to Yugoslavia.

A group of fascist terrorists known as Ustashi allied itself with Italian Premier Benito Mussolini and also worked with Germany's Adolf Hitler. Under the lead of Ante Pavelic, the Ustashi created the Independent Government of Croatia and was officially welcomed by the Catholic hierarchy through Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac. Stepinac was the head of the Council of Bishops in Yugoslavia and also the military apostolic vicar of the Ustashi army. Pope Pius XII not only bestowed his paternal protection upon Pavelic and the new Croatian state but allied the Roman Catholic church with Italian, Spanish, and German fascism. When World War II ended and Mussolini and Hitler were defeated, Pavelic hid at the Vatican before going to Argentina; Yugoslavia was reconstructed.

Since memories are short, in 1991 and 1992 both Croatia and Slovenia, predominantly Catholic republics, declared their independence and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman revived the Ustashi flag. The Vatican was the first to recognize Croatian independence while the republic was fighting against Serbs and Bosnian Muslims. Toward the end of 1993, Croatian leaders stated that Muslim militants were about to begin a full-scale jihad against the West. Iran had sent financial aid and several hundred revolutionary guards as military instructors to Bosnia.

Pope John Paul II, however, realized that if the Muslims were defeated Islamic nations would turn against the Christian West. So he worked against the massacre of the Muslims and pressured the leaders of the Western alliance to step in. This eventually happened when the United States sent covert arms to the Muslims and through the Dayton accords arrived at a truce in 1995 to stop the war.

An important factor in Catholic support of Croatia was Opus Dei (The Work of God), a secret and highly disciplined order with huge sums of money and 80,000 members worldwide. It was successful early in the papacy of John Paul in persuading him to make the order his personal prelature--the equivalent of a bishopric without a territory. The most exhaustive book on the subject, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, written by investigative reporter Robert Hutchson in 1997, says:

   Opus Dei's Washington network, which by then (1993) extended from the papal
   nunciature on Massachusetts Avenue to the White House, the F.B.I., and the
   Pentagon, provided the Croats with the right contacts.

An Opus Dei member, Father Ron Gillis, revealed that the order "was attempting to recruit inside the Pentagon and that he himself regularly gave lectures there on military ethics."

In 1994 Croatian Defense Minister Gojko Susak appealed to the Clinton administration for help "in educating the Croatian General Staff." The State Department agreed to let Military Professional Resources (MPR) go to Zagreb after a visit to the Croatian capital in September 1994 by John Paul, who urged the Croats to continue standing firm for Christendom. MPR was led by retired U.S. Army generals and colonels. Its aim was to change Croatia's army into one that could get battlefield superiority over Serbia. Upon Croatia's request, Iran was also given the opportunity to ship arms to Bosnian Muslims through Croatia so they could defend themselves against the Serbs.

While these developments with Croatia were taking place, John Paul was advised by Opus Dei leaders to form an alliance with Islamic fundamentalists to prevent the September 1994 United Nations-sponsored Cairo Conference on Population and Development from approving contraception and abortion. A papal envoy was sent to Iran and to Libya a month before the conference and deals were arranged for fundamentalists' support in Cairo. Opus Dei also organized a closed-door conference in Barcelona, Spain, in early 1995 to deal with Islamic immigration to Europe and also the fact that Islam was winning recruits among Europe's Catholics by the hundreds each year.

These efforts have been part of the Vatican's larger strategy to deal with Islamic forces. Alternately, it has been one of negotiation and one of conflict, preferably enlisting others to fight the Vatican's wars.

In February 1993 John Paul visited Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where a war had been going on between the Islamic north and the Christian south. The Sudanese government had cleaned up the Cathedral at Khartoum and prepared a nearby square for an open-air mass for the pope. However, he failed to achieve better relations when he warned Islamic leaders head on to stop killing Christians in the south and to stop the "terrible harvest of suffering." Not long thereafter, the Sudanese north began a new offensive in the south.

The Vatican did not respond immediately, but sometime in 1995 Christian Solidarity International appeared in the south. The organization enlisted support from neighboring countries and built a disciplined resistance force. No one seems to know anything about its origin or whence came its resources, but it was able to destroy an elite mechanized division from the north and take all of its equipment.

Pope John Paul II has no hesitation about the killing of those he regards as opponents. He holds that "Christians [Catholics] have a right and even a duty to protect their existence and freedom by proportionate means against an unjust aggressor." The word unjust is used to define any war against the church. And if there is any doubt about Opus Dei and its relation to the papacy, it is dispelled by Their Kingdom Come, which quotes two rules of the secret order: "The lesson is clear, crystal clear: All things are lawful for me, but not all things are expedient" and "Dirty clothes are washed at home."

John Paul has apologized specifically to Jews for the centuries of anti-Semitism by the church's people, but he has never apologized specifically to Muslims for the many crusades organized against them. Father Georges Cottier, a theologian whose international theological commission helped draft Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Mistakes of the Past, explained why not in the March 2, 2000, New York Times:

   It cannot be done with the Muslims, because Islam does not recognize the
   Christian notion of pardon.... In places where Christians [Catholics] and
   Christian missionaries are in the minority, it would be taken as a sign of
   weakness. We couldn't write it down that way, but that was the thought.

In other words, even the pope's apologies for past sins of church members were not simply spiritual pronouncements but matters of strategy evaluated by the potential response of his audience.

Would an apology specifically to Muslims make a difference in relations with Islamic nations? It might, because there are millions of nonfundamentalist moderate Muslims in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. But until then, anyone who reads the news about violence against Christians (Catholics) and against Muslims anywhere in the world should be aware of the consequences of the conflict between two of the world's numerically largest religious groups-each numbering about one billion people and each with antagonism toward the other.

John M. Swomley has a Ph.D. in political science and international affairs from the University of Colorado and is professor emeritus of social ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri.