Beyond Understanding

Austria’s President Kurt Waldheim has expressed his deep personal appreciation at being honored on a state visit to the Vatican by Pope John Paul II. The Vatican, on its part, has taken pains to note that there was nothing personal about the reception at all. The Pope, it says, was simply following protocol in receiving the head of state of a country that he had earlier visited. Whatever the contrary interpretations of the meeting’s significance, it is painfully clear that Waldheim got what he wanted. The man who is officially unwelcome in most of the civilized world because of his alleged complicity in Nazi wartime atrocities will now be able to claim a kind of symbolic international acceptance for what he is, if not necessarily for what he did.

Certainly it could not have been the Pope’s intention to cooperate in trying to scrub clean the record of Waldheim’s past, or to condone the deceit with which he tried to hide it. John Paul II, who witnessed the suffering that took the lives of millions of his fellow Poles, has been outspoken in his condemnation of persecution generally and of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust specifically. Just as certainly, the Vatican’s invitation to Waldheim has left it exposed to a charge of appalling misjudgment and insensitivity on a fundamental matter of moral responsibility.

A Vatican spokesman, seeking to explain the inexplicable, says that Austria exerted great pressure for an official invitation to its president almost from the day he took office a year ago. For a time the Vatican stalled. Ultimately it capitulated, apparently deciding that its relations with a predominantly Roman Catholic country were more important than how the visit would be perceived by the world at large. The Vatican had a choice. It could align itself, if only by tactfully and indefinitely putting off the visit, with those who regard Waldheim with moral repugnance. Or it could pretend that he was just another head of state, whose past was not at issue. The choice that it made was the wrong one.

When the U.S. Justice Department two months ago virtually banned Waldheim from ever entering this country, it cited his active participation in “persecutorial activities” that in the early 1940s led to the deaths of thousands in Greece and Yugoslavia. Waldheim--and his government--continues to deny that there is any substantiation for these charges. Most countries that have looked at the record believe otherwise; that is why they want nothing to do with the Austrian president. Waldheim’s visit to the Vatican does not erase the question of his wartime activities or his shameful attempts to conceal them. It will, however, now allow him to claim a form of exoneration. It is perfectly understandable why Waldheim insisted on being received by the Pope. It is beyond understanding why that request was granted.