Keys of This Blood (47 page)

Such situation rooms may not actually exist in every case. But the concept presents an orderly and accurate way to track John Paul's intelligence, understanding and appraisal of the various individuals, systems and groups that have crowded into the arena of the millennium endgame. It is a way to see, as if through the Pontiffs eyes, the remarkable array of forces that confront him. Forces that are truly preparing the world for a geopolitical alignment, even while they themselves are caught and carried along in the deep and irresistible currents of human affairs. These are currents, John Paul maintains, upon which all of these globalist groups will exert some influence for a time, but which none of them appears to understand, or even to perceive.

Every major globalist group in today's international arena has a system of underlying ideas about the world, and a system of acting in relation to the world that is based on those ideas.

That being so, it has to be said that anyone walking with Pope John Paul through the imaginary situation rooms of the plethora of groups
that form his first and broadest category of globalists would be hard pressed to see any trait common to them all.

Each group views the world in a different—and often in a sharply contradictory—light. Christian religions vie with each other. All of them contend with non-Christian religions, which in turn contend with one another. Religious systems compete with nonreligious ethical systems; and all of those compete with political ideologies. Groups that are relatively small and localized stand in brave and confident opposition to groups much larger in their membership and far more extensive in their geographical reach.

Despite all their differences, however, one prime characteristic is shared by all the groups in this first category, which impels the Pope to compare, contrast and assess them in similar terms. Because each of them is certain that its system of ideas, as it stands, is the basis upon which the new world order must be arranged, each is just as certain that the world will beat a path to its door. Each of these groups is certain that it can stay as it is; and that sooner or later the world at large will somehow take on the ideas and the mind-set of the group, forging itself on a grand scale into the group's image and likeness.

The likelihood that any of these groups will achieve the globalist victory it envisions is remote on the face of it. Each group's underlying system of ideas about the world cannot be adapted without essentially destroying the group itself. On the other hand, those underlying systems cannot be adopted as they stand by the rest of the world, without dislocating or displacing the primary globalist aims current among nations.

Nevertheless, to argue that these Provincial Globalists do not have a significant impact on the globalist tendencies of the rest of the world would be to go too far. Provincial though they may be, each of them has suddenly found itself on a world stage. To one degree or another, each has learned to play a role on that stage, using all the international instruments—globalized media, intergovernment and intercultural forums—to impress its outlook like a stamp on other minds.

Further, each of these Provincial groups enjoys a certain advantage in a world that is increasingly shorn of any commonly accepted system of values at the same time that it needs such a system as the glue for the new political arrangement among nations. In those circumstances, everyone feels impelled to give a hearing to any and every point of view.

It is precisely because each of these Provincial Globalist groups has a voice—and in some cases, even a certain appeal or vogue—beyond its own ken that John Paul has spent time with certain of his close associates analyzing each of them, reckoning the impact each is likely to have on
the practical order of the world's new vision of itself, and assessing the future of each.

The first Provincial Globalist group stands alone. Its situation room is home ground exclusively to those the Pope describes as the Angelists.

That name is precise in its description. For the maps and action models in this imaginary operations post show the center of the world to be those lands that are the abode of Allah's Angels, lands illumined with the heavenly light of faith of the Prophet Mohammed, and of Allah's Sacred Law, the Sharia.

The leaders who frequent this situation room may differ in the degree of moderation or extremes with which they are prepared to pursue their globalist vision and intent. Nigeria's leader, for example—Ibraham Dasuki, Sultan of Sokoto and
Sarkin Muslimi
, Commander of the Faithful—is more moderate than either the irredentist Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt or its twin in the Sudan, the Islamic Front. Different from any of those was the late Ayatollah Ruhollah (Breath of Allah) Khomeini of Iran.

What unites them with all of Islam, however, is the same light of faith and the Law that shines over all Islamic populations of the world. A total of something over 700 million souls, including those who live in the nations that stretch from Morocco on the North African shores of the Atlantic Ocean to Indonesia in the Java Sea. The Muslim name for North Africa, in fact, is indicative of the Angelist mentality. From Marrakesh to Cairo, that whole geographical region is called the Island [of faith] in the [infidel] West.

Outside of the geographical limits where the light of Allah and his Prophet shines, all lands and peoples are figured on the Angelist map in the dreadful darkness of infidelity. All are held to be in hated alliance with the Great Satan—an identity presently shared in unequal proportions by the United States and the Soviet Union.

The impact of this mentality in the present globalist-minded world has been demonstrated with different effects in different nations. And not the least of it for other globalists concerned with the ebb and flow of alliances among nations is that the Angelist mentality—fired as it is by its vibrant faith, which is channeled by skillful leaders into military and political fields—makes it very difficult, if not temporarily impossible, to see Israel as an integral part of the economic and political structure of the Middle East comity of nations. This Arab-Israeli contention, as it is called, is a permanent disturbing factor among all the nations, for the present moment. From the Angelist side, clearly there is no geopolitical
compromise possible between Israel as it is today and the Islamic forces arrayed against it. Experience since 1948 has shown that no power can afford to take up a neutral stance in this contention. Dissension, therefore, quite apart from the human losses in successive Arab-Israeli wars and through the ravages of terrorism, is the immediate fruit of Angelism.

In reckoning the future of Islam, Pope John Paul takes into account that as a genuinely religious faith, it preserves certain fundamental truths that the Holy Spirit reveals to all people of good will; and that, in God's providence, Islam can be a threshold from which its adherents can be prepared to accept the only historical revelation made by God in this world. There will come a day, John Paul believes, when the heart of Islam—already attuned to the figures of Christ and of Christ's Mother, Mary—will receive the illumination it needs. In the meantime, the Pontiff knows that Islam will stand against him and his Church and his geopolitical vision. Still, the Pope can foresee no possibility that the Angelist mentality, so graphically clear in this first globalist situation room, will serve as the practical stuff from which the world will be able to fashion its future.

In the second Provincial Globalist situation room, one set of maps and action models is shared by several groups of Christians (Adventists, Baptistic and Evangelical sects) and non-Christians (Christian Scientists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Unitarians), who are as exclusive-minded as their Muslim counterparts, but without the expressly political ambitions and the revolutionary extremism.

Minimalists, some of John Paul's associates call these groups, because they expect to constitute a minimum of the world's population until some (as yet) unknown day—the “Last Day”—of mankind's earthly history.

Minimalist is an adequate term to describe these groups as far as their membership goes; except for the Baptistic and Evangelical sects, where the numbers are reliably placed around 50–70 million worldwide, none of the others exceed 7 million, the smallest number belonging to the Jehovah's Witnesses (mid six figures). And the term Minimalist aptly sums up the essence of whatever globalist outlook they have developed. Deliberately restrictive in their idea of how the vast majority of mankind will fare in the long and final run, they expect that their religious outlook, now shared by a minimum of human beings, will become the absolute norm for all those (a restricted number) who will fare well and achieve eternal happiness.

Because none of them are “churches of the poor,” being largely located
in the economically upper-middle and upper classes of society, their influence can be disproportionately larger than their numerical size would warrant. Most of the groups officially engage in very active and well-heeled missionary work, in which they compete with Roman Catholic missionizing attempts. Each one of them has a deeply rooted opposition amounting to a nourished enmity for all that John Paul represents as Churchman and as geopolitician.

In their quite evident globalism one cannot detect even the basic lines of geopolitical thought. Placing their central hopes for victory in the arrival of some particular “day of the Lord” and lacking any lived experience of geopolitical action, they are globalist in outlook but do not enter the georeligious contention. Their interest for John Paul lies in the element of opposition to him that they present. That opposition among the non-Christian Minimalists is obvious especially if, like the Mormons and Christian Scientists, they deny the central tenet of John Paul's Christianity: namely, the divinity of Jesus. Among the Christian Minimalists, the opposition is virulent and has a long history. Despite the mutual differences, for instance, between the Advent Christian Church, the Church of God of Abrahamic Faith, and the Seventh-Day Adventists, they are at one in the opposition to Rome as the “Red Whore of the Mediterranean.”

Given their separate and separatist perspectives on the world, in one sense these groups are uneasy allies at best. But there is good reason for them to be placed by John Paul in one command center.

For one thing, their origins unite them in a particular point of view concerning Pope John Paul. They all arose within the context of rebellion against the authority and privileged teaching power of the Roman Church. At different times and places, each Minimalist group climbed off the battered but always advancing georeligious caravan of the papal Church. Each group remains at the place where it disembarked. And each retains its deep objections to the authority now embodied in the pontificate and the person of John Paul II.

Another important and practical trait shared by Minimalists is that all of the groups sprang up within Western democracies; and the vast majority of them are homegrown products of the United States. They have been formed in the very womb of Western democratic principles about the rights of man and the dignity of the individual. And with few exceptions, they accept the latter-day American interpretation of the “wall” that separates church and state.

The difficulty for John Paul—and indeed for the Minimalist groups themselves—is that the democratic principles to which they have bound
themselves are about to swamp the systems of underlying ideas by which they identify themselves and on the basis of which they desire to interact with the rest of the world. In their eyes, their regard and respect for democratic principles impose upon them the obligation—the religious, as well as the civil and political obligation—to defend every person's right to be wrong. Every person must have the right not only to believe in Hell of the Damned and Heaven of the Saved. Every person must literally be assured the right to choose Hell over Heaven. That obligation carried to that extreme not only sets the Minimalists apart from John Paul; it sets them against him, as well.

It sets them apart from the Holy Father, because democratic principles cannot take precedence over divine revelation. No one can be forced to believe in Heaven or Hell, or to choose the one over the other. Nevertheless, it is axiomatic for John Paul that no one has the right—democratic or otherwise—to a moral wrong; and no religion based on divine revelation has a moral right to teach such a moral wrong or abide by it. In a world that has come to see itself in the “right to be wrong” perspective common to the Minimalists, the claim of each of these groups to be heard on an equal footing with everyone else cannot be shunted aside.

Like the Angelists, in John Paul's perspective all Minimalist groups contain some parts of the full revelation made by God to his Church, which he placed under Peter's care. On the Day of Reward and Retribution for which each of these groups waits, whatever elements of true religion each maintains will surely be integrated into a profession of the full faith of Christ.

In the interim, however, it is evident to Pope John Paul that as an array of groups who have crowded into the arena of the millennium endgame, the importance of the Minimalists is that they render the world a more congenial place for groups who profess to embrace the same democratic principles, but who are totally bereft and contemptuous of any truly religious elements embraced by the Minimalists, and who are far more ambitious than the Minimalists to establish a practical globalist agenda well before the “Last Day” arrives.

In the third situation room of the Provincial Globalists, John Paul gazes at maps and action models riven with the outlook of two groups whose pathos he cannot deny, but whose helplessness neither he nor any mortal man can relieve. For both groups are caught in historical crevasses from which there is no retreat, no advance, no escape.

The world map John Paul examines in this center has been fashioned
to suit the Eastern Orthodox Christian mentality still preserved among Greek, Russian and other Christian minorities strewn throughout the Middle East. It is a map the Orthodox Christians willingly share with the tiny remnants of the once vibrant Anglican Catholic community.