Religion: Apostle Endangered

Soon after Giovanni Battista Cardinal Montini became Pope Paul VI in 1963, he made it clear that he was going to be a traveling Pope—”an apostle on the move.” In the seven years since, he has made good that promise by traveling farther and more often than all his predecessors combined: eight trips totaling 41,000 miles. His ninth trip, which began last week—a punishing, 28,000-mile, ten-day pilgrimage taking him as far as Australia and Samoa—was the longest thus far and, as it turned out, the most dangerous. In Manila, Paul VI came closer than any Pope in centuries to being assassinated.

The attack came shortly after the Pontiff stepped out of his chartered Alitalia DC-8 into the bright sunshine at Manila airport. As Paul and Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos pushed through throngs of admirers, a crewcut man in gray clerical garb, holding a crucifix, rushed forward. Suddenly he slipped a foot-long Malay dagger out of his sleeve and lunged. Churchmen around the Pope blocked the assailant, and security men swiftly wrestled him out of the way.

Publicity Stunt? The would-be assassin, police soon learned, was not a Filipino but a Bolivian painter, Benjamin Mendoza y Amor, 35, who had lived in Argentina, the U.S., Japan, Hong Kong and the Philippines since leaving La Paz in 1962. He wanted to kill the Pope, he claimed, “to save the people from hypocrisy and superstition.” In an interview the next day, Mendoza said that he had first formed the idea of assassinating the Pope “a long time ago,” and would try again if he were free. Filipino acquaintances agreed that Mendoza was “a frustrated artist.” A New York gallery owner, Louis Ruocco, noted that the painter was a “user of people,” who admired Salvador Dali and his methods of attracting publicity. The attack, Ruocco guessed, was probably a publicity stunt. But Ligoa Duncan, another gallery owner, suggested that the “modest man” she knew would not have attempted such an act on his own.

While Mendoza remained in custody, charged with assault and attempted murder (maximum penalty: 15 years), the Pope went on about his schedule unruffled. The day after the incident some 200,000 worshipers jammed Manila’s Rizal Park while the Pope concelebrated Mass with Asian bishops and ordained 200 priests from Asian countries.

From its outset, the papal pilgrimage had proceeded at a headlong pace. Paul’s first stop was at Teheran airport in Iran, where the Pope greeted a small crowd of Iranian Roman Catholics and conferred for 30 minutes with Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. It was long after midnight before the papal plane reached Dacca, where Paul stopped only long enough to deliver a message of sympathy to the stricken East Pakistanis and a contribution of $10,000 toward the relief of the starving victims of the recent cyclone and tidal wave. Even in the air, the Pope was busy, dispatching messages to countries he overflew. Among the recipients were the Presidents of both North and South Viet Nam. He extended “respectful” greetings to each, encouraging “a just peace” and “fraternal concord.”

If the health of the Pope holds up, the heavy pace will continue: Western Samoa, via Pago Pago, on Sunday; Australia on Monday; Djakarta Thursday; Hong Kong Friday morning, and Colombo, Ceylon, Friday evening on the way back to Rome. What does he hope to accomplish in return for such a grueling schedule? “It will stimulate missionary activity and broaden understanding with other religions in the service of progress and peace,” he said in his farewell speech in Rome. But more than ever before, various aspects of the Pope’s traveling plans have been criticized by the press and even by some prelates. To add to his discomfiture, he touched off criticism among his own cardinals shortly before leaving Rome by decreeing that cardinals over 80 could henceforth neither hold “Vatican office” nor vote in a papal election. The Pope suggested in his directive that “the problem of advanced age” might affect “grave and delicate roles” of cardinals.

Unwitting Help. Criticism of the trip started with Sydney’s Anglican Archbishop Marcus Loane, who announced in October that he would not attend an ecumenical service with the Pope; Loane cited such doctrinal differences as papal infallibility to explain his refusal. A columnist in Turin’s La Stampa criticized the Dacca stop, arguing that the papal visit would pull needed men and equipment off relief operations. A Catholic monthly in Colombo asked whether papal visits “help clarify fundamental issues or mystify them,” pointing out that the Pontiff could give equally impassioned speeches in “racist Portugal” and in “underdeveloped Uganda.”

In the light of such criticism, Mendoza may have unwittingly helped the papal cause with his abortive assassination attempt. As most such attempts do, it focused both attention and sympathy on the intended victim—in this case a frail, determined man who means somehow to be a leader in an increasingly disjointed world. His exhortations on peace and international generosity seem to have borne little fruit, and he apparently hopes that his own concerned presence may somehow make his message mean more.