Vietnam [2]

Sir: The article by ‘John Halifax’ in your columns of August 10 entitled ‘Father Jaegher Talks Sense’ is plausible but by no means infallible. When Father Jaegher speaks within the limits of his teaching authority, his Catholic flock will listen to him as an interpreter of doctrine; but as a political commentator interpreting Vietnamese policy for a New Zealand audience he is no more and no less knowledgeable than a score of others. I do not know Father Jaegher’s nationality. It is certainly unlikely to be Vietnamese. If he is an American priest, it is by no means impossible that he is influenced by nationalist prejudice. He would not be the first or the last. The late Cardinal Spellman was another. I have heard of priests in Vietnam who have cried out when their villages were bombed and their people burned alive, that no political or social considerations could justify such slaughter. Certainly Catholic opinion is unlikely ever to be pro-Communist. But it is one thing to oppose the Communist ideology and another to back to the hilt the foreign policy of the U.S.A., implicitly condemned by the present Pope. I suggest that Father Jaegher would do well to re-read Pacem in Terris and Populorum Progressio, in order to understand how alien his militarist approach is to the present mind of the Church to which he belongs.

1968 (524)