Haiti: Church v. Statism

Before dawn one day last week, police and armed civilian partisans of Haiti’s President François Duvalier burst in on the country’s top remaining Roman Catholic cleric. Haitian-born Bishop Remy Augustin was hustled off to jail so. fast he forgot his dental plates. Fourteen hours later he was expelled from the island. Two days later four more priests were expelled.

The Vatican was outraged, immediately decreed automatic excommunication for all those who took part in expelling the bishop. Presumably this included Duvalier himself. But Haiti’s power-hungry President has already gone too far to stop. Since his election three years ago, he has smashed the labor unions and jailed the political opposition. Now all that stands in his way is the students and the strong support they draw from the church in heavily Roman Catholic Haiti.

Last week’s final declaration of war had its genesis in a church-supported student strike against the strong-arm regime last November. Duvalier replied by closing the schools for Christmas a month early and expelling the then ranking churchman. He drew up a law that held parents responsible for the students’ attendance and conduct under pain of severe penalties. Once again, the church sided with the youngsters. As students prepared another strike, a group of teaching priests and nuns addressed a letter to Duvalier with barbed questions about the new law.

By Duvalier’s lights, there was no further point in arguing He readied his U.S. equipped and Marine-trained gendarmery, called in his sports-shirted bullyboys and cracked down on the church. At week’s end Duvalier suspended a shoot-on-sight curfew ordered earlier, but showed no sign of flinching in his drive for total control.