Tutu Grapples With New Political Role : South Africa: The Anglican archbishop says church must closely monitor longtime ally Nelson Mandela’s government even if the results are painful.

During the 27 years of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu emerged as the most vocal and compelling opponent of South Africa’s white minority government and its policy of apartheid.

“Jesus disobeyed the ruler. So we have a good example,” he told worshipers in 1989.

But when his longtime ally Mandela won the country’s first free presidential election in April, Tutu’s church lost both its foe and its focus. And the archbishop had to ask himself: What is the role of the church in a new and fragile democracy?

“We have discovered that it was a lot easier to be against, far more difficult to say what you are for,” Tutu said recently in Atlanta.

Tutu was attending an international conference on religious human rights, sponsored by Emory University, in advance of a U.S. tour to promote his new book, “The Rainbow People of God: The Making of a Peaceful Revolution.” The book is a compilation of Tutu’s correspondences, sermons and interviews during the past 18 years.

Church leaders, Tutu said, should not retreat from public involvement. Rather, they should act as “vigilant watchdogs,” monitoring government activities to see if they are consistent with the biblical mandate to provide for the poor.

“When the ANC (African National Congress) government came to power, many people thought that we would suddenly shut our eyes to things we thought were wrong,” he said. “But for God’s credibility and the credibility of the church, we have to speak the truth.”

Tutu’s monitoring role was most apparent when he publicly chastised South African government leaders in August for voting salary increases for themselves and criticized the state-controlled Armscor Corp., an arms procurement agency, for planning to double South African arms exports next year.

Mandela, who was stung by the criticism, asked Tutu why he hadn’t raised the matters privately.

Tutu maintained that he had spoken to Mandela first, but later questioned the ethics of discussing public policy in private.

“I remembered that we used to criticize the white Dutch Reformed Church very much for not criticizing the government openly. They (used to say) ‘We have spoken to them behind closed doors.’ And so now I understood their dilemma. It’s painful to criticize people of whom you are very fond and with whom you are on the same side.”

Mandela, Tutu said, took the reproach seriously. “He announced here that (the Parliament) is going to take cuts.”

The archbishop hopes that the church will be an active participant in Mandela’s program of reconstruction and development, participating in housing and job training projects. Translating a theological commitment to the poor into an economic reality is among the church’s toughest challenges. Tutu wants to convince international lenders to declare a moratorium on repayments of South Africa’s debt.

“We are enlisting our sisters and brothers in other parts of the world to take this as seriously as they took the question of apartheid. I think the Third World, especially Africa, must be given a chance for a new beginning.”

Tutu and church leaders in countries such as Haiti, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda also are grappling with the issue of how to facilitate healing in deeply divided countries.

“We need to deal with our past or it will come back to haunt us,” says Tutu. “Wounds have to be opened up and cleansed or they will fester. What we are looking for is not so much retribution, but restitution--finding out how you can make victims feel they have been rehabilitated, vindicated and that their humanity has not been undermined.

“A commission is going to be appointed, and I said to the minister of justice, ‘I hope that you’re going to ensure that some of the commissioners are actually victims. . . . Then we can decide how do you get to the truth in such a way that it does not become a witch hunt and it doesn’t become a thing where you condone everything. For some atrocities there can’t be just amnesty.”

Mandela, Tutu added, “is going to have to say, ‘Although I too am a victim and was incarcerated for 27 years, I want to apologize, to ask for forgiveness on behalf of the state that did these things.’ ”

The special task of church leaders, he said, will be to “persuade people to be willing to confess and forgive.”

To facilitate forgiveness, Tutu hopes that the clergy will play a “less overtly political role” than they “needed to play when our leaders were in exile or in jail.”

In 1990, he noted, the Anglican bishops “prohibited clergy from being card-carrying members of political parties. The objection was: ‘If you were in the ANC, how could you minister to people in the Inkatha (Freedom) Party when they were killing one another?’ ”

Members of the clergy objected to the restriction before April’s election. While most Anglican priests refrained from joining parties, some made their political preferences clear, obeying the letter but not the spirit of the law.

“Some clerics maintained that you couldn’t be politically neutral,” said Tutu. “I said, ‘Well, it’s easy. Return the license that allows you to operate as a priest and you can become a member of a political party.’ ”

But the Anglican bishops, said Tutu, reviewed the matter and decided that each diocese could set its own policy. The archbishop says he changed his own mind “very reluctantly.”

“In my diocese I’m probably going to say, ‘You can become members of parties, but please be discreet.’ Maybe in time people won’t care two hoots who you voted for as a priest. But now in too many places it’s a matter of life and death.”