Cleric Decries Terrorism on Both Sides : Pope Hears Cry to End Chile’s ‘Death Culture’

Pope John Paul II on Sunday heard a bluntly outspoken archbishop’s anguished cry against the “culture of death” and “terrorism of the state” under the military regime of President Augusto Pinochet.

The complaint came from 71-year-old Archbishop Jose Manuel Santos Ascarza at the outset of a tiring four-city round of papal appearances on the sixth day of the pontiff’s current two-week South America tour.

Santos, welcoming John Paul to a papal Mass in Concepcion, Chile’s second largest city, cried out against what he called “a death culture through terrorism of the opposition or through terrorism of the state, through horrendous crimes whose authors are never discovered by justice.”

The outcry by the archbishop, widely known for his condemnations of the Pinochet regime’s human rights abuses, was the most forthright that the 66-year-old pontiff has heard in a public setting during his dozens of Chilean appearances since arriving in the country Wednesday.

The dramatic characterization of the situation in Chile also was heard and enthusiastically applauded by about 400,000 worshipers, most of them workers, who attended the Concepcion Mass.

One of the workers, among thousands who have become embittered over layoffs and low wages in the region’s coal mines, addressed a litany of complaints to the Pope. Speaking to John Paul and the audience at the beginning of the Mass, the workman asked that “hearts be opened to dignify the personhood of workers, to create work and just salaries and to generate respect and total liberty for workers’ organizations.”

In a prepared response, the pontiff expressed understanding and support and said, “I know your legitimate claims about unions,” adding that “El Papa (the Pope) makes his own your legitimate aspirations for justice and takes them in his heart.”

John Paul said he was very familiar with the workers’ worries, “many of them related to problems of social justice which require from all a decisive intervention to achieve resolutions.”

“I carry with me all of your intentions,” he said in an unplanned aside, and his spokesman explained that the Pope referred to all of the workers’ complaints.

Encourages Indians

The Pope also flew to this sun-baked Pacific Coast beach resort, a classic Spanish colonial town where, perhaps in keeping with its name, the citizens appeared to be calmer and more relaxed than in some of the more turbulent towns and cities the Pope has visited in Chile.

Before addressing scores of thousands near the white sand beach here, however, the pontiff spoke to a huge gathering in the central Chilean town of Temuco that included thousands of Mapuche Indians who have complained of discrimination at the hands of the descendants of the country’s European settlers.

The Pope said he had come to Temuco “to encourage the Mapuches to conserve with a healthy pride the culture of their people; the traditions and customs, the language and their own values.”

Noting that “not just a few times you have been the objects of injustice,” John Paul pleaded with the Indians to stick it out on their lands and not disperse into the cities.

“Do not let yourself be seduced by those who offer tempting and illusory solutions to your problems such as hatred and violence, or the unjustified abandonment of the countryside and of your own values in order to find yourselves often with a life that is more precarious and difficult in the cities,” he told them.

“In defending your identity you not only exercise a right but also fulfill a duty to transmit your culture to coming generations, enriching in that way the whole Chilean nation,” John Paul said.