Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress

13. ‘‘Hurt, bitter, and confused’’

13 ‘‘Hurt, bitter, and confused’’ In many ways, the travels of Drinan’s last two years in Congress were trips that summed up the pattern and goals of his life. The persona of the advocate for the oppressed—particularly black people, immigrants, refugees, and victims of dictatorial governments—was first implanted on his 1969 trip to Vietnam, where he employed the research method of listening to a cross-section of the society, from prisoners to presidents , then returning home to paint the shocking scene he and his committee had experienced and to ask what the American citizens and their religious leaders were going to do about his discoveries. In 1979–80 he alone or with congressional or ecumenical colleagues flew to South Africa in February; to Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia , and Hanoi in August; and finally to Guatemala, Nicaragua, and a return to El Salvador in December and January. He reported his findings for America; or, in twenty-nine-page co-written reports, he fingered guilty foreign leaders and recommended changes in national policy. Apartheid was the legislated separation of the races imposed in 1948 in South Africa by the African Nationalist Party headed by Daniel F. Malan—into whites, black Africans, coloured (mixed), and Asians. Whites ruled. Each race was relegated to a particular territory, and blacks, who had been allocated only 13 percent of the land, could not leave their area without a pass. In urban areas, for example Johannesburg and Cape Town, black neighborhoods were often sprawling, terrible shanty-town slums. Blacks toiled in the gold and diamond mines, the men separated for months and years from their families, and they 296 | ‘‘hurt, bitter, and confused’’ were forbidden to strike in protest of their wages or working conditions . By the time Drinan arrived, a significant political resistance had formed. In 1960 the government had killed 69 peaceful protesters in black Sharpeville; in 1963 young Nelson Mandela, head of the African National Congress, was sentenced to life in prison; in 1977 police killed at least four children in a crowd of 10,000 demonstrating in black Soweto township, setting off a bloody ongoing battle that killed more than a thousand; police arrested and most likely caused the death of student organizer Stephen Biko in prison. The Catholic and Anglican churches were supporting the struggles of their faithful. Drinan, as was his method, focused on one victim and publicized his case. The Louvain-educated Reverend Samangaliso Mkhatshwa, thirty-two, secretary of the bishops’ conference for eight southern African nations, had been ‘‘banned’’—which meant he could not preach, teach, write, or speak to the media—for five years. Mkhatshwa, who had been jailed for six months following the student riots in Soweto, had advocated that American corporations disinvest in South Africa in protest against the policy of apartheid. Rather than shut up, Mkhatshwa used his victim status as a springboard for continuing his attacks on the government to visiting spokesmen like Drinan. His basic message : ‘‘It is simply immoral for four million white people to segregate and brutalize 19 million black people’’ (America, February 3, 1979). The president of the Southern African Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Joseph P. Fitzgerald, urged Drinan to alert world opinion to their plight. Drinan’s reply was to ask America’s readers to write to Mkhatshwa in support, and above all to bombard South Africa’s ambassador to the United States with protests. America’s readers did so. Ambassador David B. Sole showed up in Drinan’s Washington office one day, March 30, 1979, though not yielding an inch, to make his case. On January 28, 1979, said the ambassador , Pope John Paul II, addressing the Puebla, Mexico, Conference of Latin American Bishops, had gone out of his way to state that Jesus was not a political activist involved in the class struggle. ‘‘This conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth, does not tally with the Christian Catechesis.’’ Jesus, the pope had said, ‘‘does not accept the position of those who mix the things of ‘‘hurt, bitter, and confused’’ | 297 God with merely political attitudes.’’ Drinan interpreted this line of argument as the ambassador’s manipulating the words of the Holy Father to suggest that they applied to Reverend Mkhatshwa, who was asserting himself on behalf of the victims of apartheid. To a degree, Drinan was correct. The pope’s statement may not...