Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 7—December IB, 1980
New Apostolic Delegate
BY JOHN MAHER
NC News Service
Archbishop Pio Laghi, the new apostolic delegate in
the United States, “is a charming, very intelligent priest”
who “speaks English fluently” and knows the United
States well, said a Chicago priest who served with him on
the staff of the apostolic delegation in Washington, D.C.
The 58-year-old Italian-born archbishop, who has been
apostolic nuncio to Argentina for the past six years, was
secretary at the apostolic delegation in Washington from
1954 to 1961.
“He traveled about the country a good bit and knows
it well,” said Msgr. Robert J. Hagarty, pastor of St.
Norbert parish in Northbrook, Ill., who was on the staff
of the delegation from 1956 to 1961.
Expressing dislike for the terms “liberal” and
“conservative,” Msgr. Hagarty described Archbishop Laghi
as theologically “orthodox” and said: “He’s open to
change where change is possible, but not where it isn’t.”
The new apostolic delegate, Msgr. Hagarty said, likes to
swim and “like most Italians, likes to play bocce ball,” a
bowling game at which Pope John Paul II has tried his
hand twice recently.
Archbishop Laghi, “is personable, outgoing, an avid
tennis player and, in theological matters, a man of energy
and vision who can probably be best described as a
creative moderate,” said a priest who knew him in
Palestine when the archbishop was serving as apostolic
delegate in Jerusalem and Palestine from 1969 to 1974.
A.E.P. Wall, editor of The Chicago Catholic, newspaper
of the Chicago Archdiocese, and his wife met Archbishop
Laghi several years ago when they were his dinner guests
at the apostolic delegation in Jerusalem.
“He had a tremendous grasp of the religious, political
and social realities of the Middle East,” Wall recalled. “I
learned more from conversations with him than from
many formal briefings by others.”
Wall described the archbishop as “an urbane man with
a sense of humor that appeals to Americans.”
He said he next met Archbishop Laghi at a reception
at the nunciature in Buenos Aires for delegates to the
1974 World Congress of the Catholic Press.
“He seemed just a bit embarrassed by the opulence of
the nuncio’s palace, and explained that it had been given
to the church by a wealthy Argentine family,” Wall said.
“He is sensitive to social issues.”
Wall said Archbishop Laghi had handled delicate
matters skillfully in Jerusalem and Buenos Aires.
In Rome, Jesuit Father Robert Graham, co-editor of
the official documentary series on the Vatican’s activities
in World War II, who called Archbishop Laghi the
“godfather” of that research activity, said the new
apostolic delegate is “very personable,” but “not a
hail-fellow-well-met.”
“When he’s talking to you, you know that you’re the
only one he’s talking to,” the Jesuit said.
Describing Archbishop Laghi as “very open” and
possessed of a lively sense of humor, Father Graham said
“he’s not a stick-in-the-mud.”
The archbishop speaks at least four languages - Italian,
Spanish, English and French - fluently, he said.
Father Gino Belleri, a Rome priest who has known
Archbishop Laghi for 20 years, described him as
“dynamic,” “open,” “cordial” and “deeply religious,” but
also “shrewd, astute,” very good in economic matters.
Father Belleri said he believes that Archbishop Laghi
was named apostolic delegate in the United States because
he is “open but secure in doctrine.”
Joseph Lichten, representative in Rome of the
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, who met
Archbishop Laghi in the 1960s, said he considers him “a
Conference On Church-State Issues
WASHINGTON (NC) - A major national conference
on government intervention in religious affairs, sponsored
jointly by the leading Catholic, Protestant and Jewish
organizations in the United States, will be held Feb. 11-13
in Bethesda, Md., a suburb of Washington.
The conference, an outgrowth of concern over
increased government intervention in the internal affairs
of religious organizations, will feature speakers addressing
a variety of issues, ranging from Internal Revenue Service
treatment of religious bodies and state regulation of
non-public elementary and secondary schools to public
health permits required for church suppers.
The keynote address will be given by William B. Ball, a
Harrisburg, Pa., attorney nationally known for his
litigation in church-state cases. His topic will be
“Government as Big Brother to Religious Bodies.”
Bishop Thomas Kelly, general secretary of the U.S.
Catholic Conference, one of the sponsoring organizations,
said the conference’s purpose will be to sharpen the
awareness of church representatives on issues of
church-state concern.
“Considering the importance of the subject matter and
the widespread interest which this topic has generated, the
conference can be expected to be an event of considerable
significance in the life of the churches,” he stated.
Other co-sponsors are the National Council of
Churches (NCC), which represents 32 Protestant and
Orthodox denominations, the Synagogue Council of
America, the National Association of Evangelicals, the
Lutheran Council in the USA and the Southern Baptist
Convention. Conference planners said the co-sponsors
represent more than 90 percent of religious adherents in
tlje United States.
Bishop Kelly has invited each Catholic bishop and state
Catholic conference director to send a representative.
Leaders of other religious organizations are doing the
same.
Planning for the conference was started several years
ago by the governing board of the National Council of
Churches. Since then, according to organizers, numerous
observers have called attention to government statutes and
administrative decisions which they view as intrusions in
the affairs of church organizations.
Speakers will include Jesuit Father Charles M. Whelan,
professor of Law at Fordham University; Wilfred R.
Caron, USCC general counsel; Dean M. Kelley,
church-state specialist for the NCC; Lawrence H. Tribe,
professor of law at Harvard University; James Wood Jr.,
editor of the Journal of Church and State at Baylor
University; George Outen, board of church and society for
the United Methodist Church, and Dean H. Lewis,
director of the United Presbyterian Church mission
council’s board on church and society.
Among their topics will be regulation of charitable
solicitations, lobbying disclosure requirements,
jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board,
unemployment compensation taxation of religious
agencies, U.S. Census Bureau samplings of religious
organizations, grand jury interrogation of church and
synagogue workers, equal employment opportunity laws
applied to religious bodies, state placement of religious
corporations into receivership and intelligence agency use
of clergy as informants.
‘Charming, Intelligent’
man who has been deeply interested in harmonious
dialogue between Catholics and Jews wherever he has
gone.” When then Msgr. Laghi was working at the Council
for the Public Affairs of the Church, he and Lichten had
many conversations about Catholic-Jewish relations and
about World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazi campaign
of genocide against the Jews. Archbishop Laghi was “very
sympathetic to the catastophe and the loss of 6 million
Jews,” Lichten said.
Archbishop Laghi has kept a low profile in the
diplomatically sensitive posts in Argentina and the Holy
Land, but he nevertheless received at least one death
threat in 1977 from a neo-Nazi group in Argentina.
Pope John Paul most recently indicated his confidence
in Archbishop Laghi by sending him to Bogota, Colombia,
last March during the takeover of the Dominican
Republic’s Embassy there.
The pope described the archbishop as the Vatican’s
“special envoy in Bogota at this very serious moment,”
After a 61-day embassy takeover, 16 hostage diplomats -
including Archbishop Angelo Acerbi, papal nuncio to
Colombia, and U.S. Ambassador Diego Asencio - were
released unharmed.
While he was apostolic delegate in Jerusalem and
Palestine, Archbishop Laghi never gave press conferences
on the Jerusalem issue. He said the statements of Pope
Paul VI made the Vatican’s policy clear.
In 1972, at the request of Pope Paul, Archbishop Laghi
helped to establish Bethlehem University, which is
administered by Christian Brothers from the United
States. He also helped to establish Epheta, a school for
deaf-mute children in Bethlehem and a housing society in
Jerusalem which has enabled more than 30 Palestinian
families to purchase their own homes.
Archbishop Laghi also undertook the restoration of
Notre Dame of Jerusalem, a huge building practically
destroyed in the 1948 war, which now serves as a hospice
and the Christian center in Jerusalem.
In 1974, he helped to establish near Tiberias a
leadership training institute for Sisters from the Third
World which is directed by Sisters of the Holy Cross from
St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind.
Archbishop Laghi, who also becomes the Vatican’s new
permanent observer to the Washington-based Organization
of American States, has observed Latin America first-hand
both in Argentina and in Nicaragua, where he was
stationed from 1952 to 1954.
Although he generally stayed out of politiccal
controversies involving Argentina’s military government,
he became the center of one controversy in late 1977
when a Brazilian newspaper reported that he had
recommended presenting a petition to the government
asking for release of ex-President Maria Peron.
The petition, containing some 50,000 signatures, was
presented to the military junta on Dec. 7, 1977. Mrs.
Peron had been under arrest since a coup in March 1976.
“The nuncio had no previous knowledge of such a
petition,” said an nunciature spokesman after the report
in Rio de Janeiro’s influential daily, Jornal do Brasil. “The
first he knew about it was in the Jornal do Brasil.”
After the coup, Mrs. Peron asked several times to see
the nuncio, but was refused.
In September 1976, the Argentine National Socialist
Front, a neo-Nazi group, threatened to “execute”
Archbishop Laghi and six other persons for “crimes
against the nation and high treason.”
Two months earlier, Archbishop Laghi had been among
a delegation of bishops who conferred with Argentine
Interior Minister Albano Harquindeguy to press for an
investigation of the murders of several priests and
seminarians by rightists. Church sources said there was a
“heated” discussion of the matter and that Archbishop
Laghi demanded on instructions from the Vatican that the
assassins be brought to justice.
NEW APOSTOLIC DELEGATE - Pope John
Paul II talks with Archbishop Pio Laghi in this
recent file photo. The pope has named
Archbishop Laghi, who has been papal nuncio in
Argentina for the past six years, as new apostolic
delegate in the United States. (NC Photo)
NEW YORK (NC) - The arms race and the consumer
society today stand in the way of authentic development,
Archbishop Helder Camara of Olinda-Recife, Brazil, said
in New York Dec. 8.
“An authentic development will be impossible in a
nuclear age, characterized by an ever increasing arms
race,” he said. ‘With the nuclear bomb, the problem of
REAGAN, CARDINAL COOKE MEET -
President-elect Ronald Reagan and Cardinal
Terence Cooke talk with reporters outside the
cardinal’s residence in New York. Meeting for
outrageous costs in the arms race is enlarged with the
terrible problem of pollution and with the terrifying
problem of destruction of life on earth.”
Regarding the consumer society, the archbishop was
particularly critical of multinational corporations.
“I don’t need to prove that the miraculous promises of
the multinational corporations are a great delusion,” he
more than an hour, the two men discussed “the
world and everything,” Reagan reported. (NC
Photo by Chris Sheridan)
said, “and that the great reality is the injurious actions
against the Third World - for instance, the devastation of
our raw materials.”
The archbishop spoke at the third annual national
gathering sponsored by the disarmament program of the
Riverside Church in New York, which has included draft
counseling and arranging more than 200 conferences in
U.S. and Canadian cities.
Also speaking were Olof Palme, former prime minister
of Sweden and currently United Nations negotiator in the
Iraq-Iran war; Studs Terkel, Chicago radio personality and
author, and the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, senior
minister of the Riverside Church.
Some 500 people from outside the New York area
attended an Evening for Peace and helped to fill the
Riverside Church to its 3,000 capacity.
In an address titled “The New Name of Peace is
Development,” Archbishop Camara said the church’s
position now is in contrast to the periods when it
supported Western colonialism and white domination of
other races.
“The Christian church proclaims that the new name of
peace is development, with the indispensable condition
that the development will be of the whole man and of all
men and women,” he said.
The Christian church knows that statistics show that
more than two-thirds of humanity live in subhuman
conditions, he added.
“It is impossible,” he continued, “for Christians and
for all believers in God and for all persons of good will to
support a social order that is above all a social disorder.”
At a press conference prior to his address the
archbishop said the greatest change in the Latin American
church during his almost 50 years as a priest was in its
attitude toward government and the social order.
In the past, he said, people tended to think Christ had
founded the church for the purpose of supporting the
social order.
Asked for an assessment of President Carter’s human
rights emphasis, Archbishop Camara said people of the
United States should ask themselves where Latin
Americans learned the practices that a U.S. president was
now critizing.
The Evening for Peace included several expressions of
concern for the situation in El Salvador and Archbishop
Camara ended his address with a prayer related to it.
“We ask that the blood of our martrys will be able to
awaken definitively our consciousness against the arms
race, against the race with military intentions, against all
racisms, against the consumer society,” he said.
“We ask that the blood of our martyrs will help
America to discover that it is not sufficient to send aid
that too often becomes an obstacle, to discover that we
will only have a new world order with a peaceful but
couragous change of bad structures that are crushing more
than two-thirds of humanity.”
Palme began his address by paying tribute to the late
Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, El Salvador,
who “gave his life having decried an outrageous social
situation,” and others killed in El Salvador, including the
three U.S. nuns and lay volunteer murdered in early
December.
Noting that candidates in the U.S. presidential election
had expressed admiration for the Polish workers, Palme
said he looked forward to hearing them express
admiration for the poor and oppressed in El Salvador,
Guatemala, Argentina and Chile.
He said the arms race continued despite its immense
costs and dangers because national leaders had lost control
of it. “We are being driven toward nuclear war by the
sheer momentum of military technology,” he said.
The hope of the future, he said, is that the public will
learn the facts about the arms race and “force the
politicians to gain controls.”
BY JIM LACKEY
WASHINGTON (NC) -- A federal commission studying
U.S. immigration policy is about to recommend amnesty
for many illegal aliens currently in the country as well as a
series of strict enforcement provisions to keep additional
illegals from crossing the border.
The Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee
Policy, chaired by Holy Cross Father Theodore M.
Hesburgh, voted on the amnesty and enforcement
provisions of its upcoming report at a Dec. 6-7 meeting in
Washington.
Father Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre
Dame, said at a news conference Dec. 8 that the remaining
issues facing the commission will be dealt with at a Jan. 6
meeting.
The commission then is scheduled to submit its final
report and its recommendations to the president and
Congress before March 1.
One issue still undecided is the question of requiring
workers to carry counterfeit-proof cards proving that they
are legal residents of the United States. Father Hesburgh
said members of the commission narrowly rejected the
controversial proposal, but he added that the votes of the
commission members unable to attend the two-day
meeting could change the outcome.
Under the proposal for amnesty, all persons in the
United States illegally as of a set date - possibly Jan. 1,
1980 - would be allowed to remain in the country.
To stop the future flow of illegals, the commission also
will recommend the imposition of civil and criminal
penalties against employers who knowingly hire
undocumented workers, as well as beefing up border
patrols and other measures to keep aliens out.
The proposal for penalties for employers hiring illegal
aliens is a controversial one in the Hispanic community.
Hispanics and leaders of other ethnic communities charge
that such penalties would make it difficult for
foreign-speaking legal residents of the country to get jobs
because employers would be unsure whether or not the
job-seeker was here illegally.
“But the only way to stem the tide of undocumented
workers is to demagnitize the magnet that brings them in
- jobs and opportunity,” said Father Hesburgh.
He adderi that he thinks worker identity cards would
be key to making that system work, but noted that many
civil rights groups have an automatic reaction against such
an identity card program.
The commission’s recommendations carry no legal
weight and will simply serve as advice to Congress, which
is expected to hold its own hearings and attempt to write
new immigration legislation. But two commission
members, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Alan
K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), expressed confidence at the news
conference that the commission’s bipartisan membership
will help speed its recommendations through the House
and Senate.
Simpson added that enough Americans are offended by
the “absolute chaos” of U.S. immigration policy to insure
that Congress will act on the commission’s
recommendations.
In other areas, the commission voted to recommend
raising the permanent immigration quota from 270,000 to
350,000 per year, plus an additional 100,000 per year for
the next five years to clear up the backlog of cases
currently awaiting action.
Making up a large part of the backlog are relatives of
new legal residents, commission'officials said, along with
an expected surge of applications from relatives of newly
legalized aliens should the amnesty program go into
effect.
Responding to criticism that immigration quotas
should not be raised, Father Hesburgh said the
commission’s recommendations in their entirety would
result in overall reductions in immigration since they
would slow if not halt the estimated 1 million aliens who
currently enter the country illegally each year.
The commission also voted to retain for the most part
the current program under which temporary workers can
be admitted to the United States for a set period of
employment. That program, said Father Hesburgh,
provides a “safety valve” when there are a number of
workers seeking entry into the United States for jobs.
Father Hesburgh and Kennedy also stressed that U.S.
immigration issues are part of a worldwide problem in
which a few countries control most of the world’s wealth.
“Suppose that there will be 1.5 billion (people) in
India by the year 2000,” said Father Hesburgh. “And
suppose that there is a series of bad harvests. What would
happen if half the population of India got up, threw a bag
of rice over their shoulders, and started walking toward
Europe?”