The Pope and the General

Pope John Paul II has leaned with the weight of his office and his church against the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile. It may be too much to hope that Pope and church can push him over. But perhaps they can weaken his pedestal.

The 71-year-old general wants to hold on to his office past the end of his current term in 1989; efforts of his opposition to return to democracy have been stymied. No part of that opposition has been firmer against him than the Chilean Roman Catholic Church, yet even that church has not as a body said harsher things about him than the Pope, who called him “dictatorial” and pointed to the Philippines’ overthrow of Ferdinand E. Marcos as an example to Chileans.

The Chilean opposition, dispirited and divided after the failed attempt on Pinochet’s life last September, had hoped, with the Chilean church, that John Paul’s visit would both lift their spirits and intimidate the dictator. It has surely done the first. One can only hope it has done the second, too.

In the last few months Pinochet has in fact moved selectively toward some liberalization of political activity and the press. Yet at the same time he continued, and may have increased, the arrest and torture of his opponents, especially among Santiago’s poor. Clashes between police and demonstrators during the Pope’s visit--once before his very eyes--tell the story.

The Pope brought the liberating message of the new church, the post-Vatican II church, to deeply Catholic Chile.

The pious general, to whom the Vatican Council is said to seem both irrelevant and dangerous, defends, with the support of a substantial number of frightened Chileans, the old

order against what he calls the mortal threat from communists. Which is how he defines much of his democratic opposition, and indeed much of the Chilean church itself.