Caribbean: Mission with a Message

Following by air from Spain the approximate route that Explorer Christopher Columbus sailed almost half a millennium ago, Pope John Paul II last week traveled to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. His mission: to launch eight years of "spiritual preparations" to commemorate the Christianization of the Americas that began with Columbus' first voyage to the New World in 1492. The Pontiff used the occasion to issue a thinly veiled denunciation of U.S. and Soviet bloc intrusion in Caribbean and Latin American affairs. He urged listeners to resist "interferences of foreign powers which follow their own economic bloc or ideological interests and reduce peoples to training grounds at the service of their strategies."

John Paul also took aim at the liberation theology movement, a mixture of Christianity and Marxist social activism that has been gaining strength in the region. Among the Pope's complaints about liberation theology is that it tends to pit Roman Catholic laity against the church hier archy. At his stop in Santo Domingo, the Pontiff warned against "considering the poor as a class in struggle, or as a church separated from communion with and obedience to its pastors."