Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

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?”