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OBIT-REAGAN Jun-7-2004 (1,800 words) With photos. xxxn
Reagan, dead at 93, drew Catholic support, opposition on his policies
By Jerry Filteau
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- In eight years in the White House, President Ronald Wilson Reagan drew Catholic support with his stands on abortion and aid to private schools but was often at loggerheads with the Catholic bishops on issues ranging from nuclear defense and welfare reform to U.S. policy in Central America.
He played a major role in shaping world events in the last decade of the Cold War and established formal U.S. diplomatic relations with the Holy See.
Reagan, who was president from 1981 to 1989, died June 5 at the age of 93 at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles after struggling with Alzheimer's disease for a decade.
Memorial plans for the late president included public services in California and Washington. Reagan's body was flown to his presidential library in Simi, Calif., where his body was to be in repose for public viewing in the main lobby of the library beginning at noon June 7. Viewing was to continue through the night and until 6 p.m. June 8.
On June 9 Reagan's body was to be flown to Andrews Air Force Base. After a formal funeral procession from the base to the U.S. Capitol Rotunda at 6 p.m., a state funeral ceremony at 7 p.m. and a viewing for national and international leaders, his body was to lie in state for public viewing through June 10.
On June 11, declared a national day of mourning, a funeral service was to take place at the Washington National Cathedral, an Episcopal church. Afterward Reagan's body was to be flown back to California for burial on the grounds of his library.
Pope John Paul II planned to send a representative to Reagan's funeral at the cathedral. A papal spokesman said the pontiff, who was in Bern, Switzerland, June 5-6, was saddened to learn of Reagan's death and had prayed for the "eternal rest of his soul." The pope paid tribute to the late president, noting his important role in the fall of European communism.
In his campaign for the presidency, Reagan ran on a platform of smaller government, but during his two terms the U.S. debt quadrupled as he cut taxes and nonmilitary spending but launched the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history. The Soviet Union's effort to keep pace with U.S. arms spending contributed to the economic and political disintegration of the Soviet bloc in 1989-90.
Reagan's nuclear saber-rattling in his 1980 presidential campaign also prompted the November 1980 initiative by the U.S. bishops that led to their landmark 1983 pastoral letter on the morality of nuclear warfare and nuclear deterrence.
His presidency marked the ascendancy of Republican neoconservatism in the country and a significant practical shift of American Catholics to the GOP camp, as pro-abortion ideology hardened among the Democratic leadership.
His espousal of free market economics and opposition to government regulation often led U.S. bishops to oppose Reagan administration policies they saw as harming the poorest and most vulnerable segments of society. One example was in housing for the poor. Between 1979 and 1987, federal funding for such housing was cut by 75 percent while the number of homeless in America rose from 200,000 to 2 million.
At the same time, his firm opposition to Democratic initiatives to provide government funding for abortion brought frequent praise from Catholic officials. As governor of California 1967-75, he had signed what in 1967 was one of the nation's most liberal abortion laws; but as president he favored a constitutional amendment to outlaw all abortions except those necessary to preserve the mother's life.
Abroad, he instituted the Mexico City policy, which barred overseas family planning organizations from receiving U.S. aid for any program that also included abortion services or abortion advocacy.
He backed tax credits or tuition vouchers for students in private schools and consistently raised the issue in addresses to Catholic teachers, the Knights of Columbus and other Catholic groups. But his support was largely rhetorical. Even though he often called it a top agenda item for his administration, he never applied the kind of political muscle to Congress that would substantiate that claim.
The Reagan administration's focus on containing communism militarily in Central America was a source of ongoing conflict with the U.S. bishops.
The bishops criticized the administration's increased military aid to the right-wing government in El Salvador amid ongoing reports of massive human rights violations by the Salvadoran military, including numerous attacks on church personnel.
Between Reagan's election and inauguration, three U.S. nuns and a lay missionary were kidnapped, raped and murdered by Salvadoran National Guardsmen.
In the months that followed, Reagan's U.N. ambassador, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, labeled the missionaries "political activists" and his secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., hypothesized that they were shot while running, or being perceived to run, a roadblock. The administration was criticized sharply for not pressing harder to end the Salvadoran cover-up of the murders.
Despite similar human rights violations by the rightist Guatemalan government Reagan certified human rights improvement there in 1983, over objections by the U.S. hierarchy, and resumed U.S. military aid that had been suspended since 1977.
In Nicaragua he supported the struggle of the right-wing Contra guerrillas against the leftist Sandinista government. A major scandal hit his administration in 1986-87 when it was learned that senior U.S. officials had arranged secret arms sales to Iran and diverted the profits into covert military aid to the Contras to circumvent Congress' denial of Contra funding.
When Congress was considering a Reagan request for $14 million in military aid to the Contras in 1985, Reagan told news photographers that the pope "has been most supportive of all our activities in Central America." The Vatican Embassy denied that the pope had expressed support for particular policies, and in congressional testimony on behalf of the U.S. bishops the following day Archbishop (later Cardinal) James A. Hickey of Washington described U.S. support for the Contra insurgency as "illegal and, in our judgment, immoral." Congress voted down the aid proposal.
As early as November 1981 the U.S. bishops were nearly unanimous in approving a statement criticizing the military focus of administration policy in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.
In 1983 Reagan achieved one of his major foreign policy successes when he responded quickly to a Marxist military coup in Grenada that would have expanded Cuban influence in the Caribbean. Just 11 days after the coup a U.S.-led international force invaded the island and quickly forced the Grenadian army and its Cuban advisers to capitulate.
The one issue on which Reagan and the bishops were most deeply and publicly divided was U.S. nuclear policy.
When the U.S. bishops met in November 1980, it was just days after Reagan was elected president on a campaign platform that included promises to launch a massive new U.S. military buildup and achieve nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union.
In his 1983 book "The Bishops and the Bomb," Jim Castelli wrote that during that meeting "Reagan's election -- with the rhetoric and policies he brought to office -- was the single greatest factor influencing the bishops' discussion" of a proposal to develop a statement addressing nuclear warfare and nuclear deterrence.
As the bishops' peace pastoral went through three drafts over the next 30 months, the administration waged a vigorous battle to influence it and change its direction. Top administration officials, including National Security Adviser William P. Clark and Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, published detailed critiques.
Aside from the pastoral itself, in public statements, congressional testimony and other forums the bishops opposed Reagan proposals to build neutron warheads, plans for deploying M-X missiles and funding for his massive Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly dubbed "Star Wars."
The bishops supported Reagan's 1987 agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on a historic treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe.
Domestically, the bishops and Catholic Charities officials were sharply critical of the social welfare cuts that appeared in every annual Reagan budget.
In 1984 Reagan appointed the first U.S. ambassador to the Holy See in 117 years, after getting Congress to repeal an 1867 law barring any funding for a U.S. embassy to what were then the Papal States.
Reagan, who had met with Pope Paul VI in 1972 while in Europe as a representative of President Nixon, met with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in 1982 and again in 1987. They also met in Alaska in 1984, when Reagan was on his way home from China and the pope on his way to South Korea, and in Miami when the pope visited the United States in 1987. The two exchanged letters or spoke by phone on a number of other occasions.
In late 1981, when Poland imposed martial law and arrested leaders of the independent labor movement Solidarity, Reagan imposed U.S. economic sanctions and supported the movement in a variety of ways. In 1992, an article in Time magazine claimed that when the president and pope met in 1982 they formed a "holy alliance" to destroy communism in Poland, setting in motion a joint operation to undermine the government there. The pope personally denied the allegations.
Reagan also had friendly relationships with U.S. Catholic leaders. On a number of occasions he met with the elected officers of the bishops' conference or with individual leaders such as the late Cardinals John Krol of Philadelphia and Terence Cooke of New York.
Cardinal Cooke visited him in Washington as he was recovering from the bullet wounds suffered in the 1981 attempt on his life by John Hinckley. In 1983 he paid a special visit to Cardinal Cooke in New York as the cardinal was nearing death from leukemia.
Reagan appointed three U.S. Supreme Court justices and elevated William Rehnquist to chief justice. He appointed Sandra Day O'Connor, the court's first female justice, and two Catholics, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy, giving the court three sitting justices who were Catholic for the first time in history. His most famous nomination was an unsuccessful one -- that of Robert H. Bork, who was rejected by the Senate after a divisive debate over his outspokenly conservative views.
Reagan's father was a Catholic, but he was raised in his mother's denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and graduated from Eureka College, a Disciples-related school in Illinois. Before his divorce from his first wife, Jane Wyman, he attended Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church. He and his second wife, Nancy, attended Bel Air Presbyterian Church in Hollywood.
Although he did not attend church frequently, he said he prayed often. Jesus "has been a part of my life. I can't conceive of a day in which I don't find myself communicating with him," he said in an interview during his 1980 presidential campaign.
END
Copyright (c) 2004 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method, in whole or in part without the prior written authority of Catholic News Service.
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