Keys of This Blood (50 page)

That process itself was given a name: “syncresis,” or “syncretism.” As part of the Mega-Religionists' special jargon for quite a while, those two words were shorthand for the Mega-Religionists' action plan. Meaning, basically, “to pour together,” they were a letter-perfect description of what was to be accomplished.

All religions of mankind were, and still are, likened to wines—some mellow, some bland, some with a heady bouquet, some of young vintage, some with the cachet of greater age. Believers from each religion—“believers with different opinions and convictions,” as Gollancz wrote—must gather small, select tastings; and then each of these choice tastings must be poured with all the others into one great new wine jar. The resultant blending will nourish the whole human community in a new harmony of thought and feeling. Finally, all political systems will follow the religions into the jar; they will be fused into a one-world political community under a one-world government.

The expected Mega-Religion that will accomplish all that has also been given a name. According to D. H. Bishop, writing in
World Faith
magazine in 1970, “since it would contain elements of every religion and would be universally acceptable,” it would be called “monodeism.”

The function of monodeism is to create and maintain among men a universal brotherhood. In fact, “brotherhood“ is one of the most important, if not always one of the clearest, terms of the Mega-Religionists. For it describes the geopolitical condition of the world they envision once Mega-Religion has been established for us all. And it also describes the somewhat mysterious group—the Brotherhood, or the Elders—that
Mega-Religionists often speak of as the behind-the-scenes guiding force of their movement. No one has ever identified the members of such a Brotherhood in public. The Elders remain unknown. And at least for the uninitiated, they appear largely as figments of the Mega-Religionist desire: a little the way the Wizard seemed to Dorothy, perhaps, in her dream state, longing to get home to Kansas by way of Oz.

Leaving aside the Brotherhood, and to give credit where credit is due, the names of two men—both from the Orient and both long dead—must forever be listed as the prime forces that made possible the widespread and influential movement of the Mega-Religionists today. The first, a Persian named Baha 'U'llah, contributed the basic ideas and principles. The second, India's Swami Vivekenanda, developed the technique for spreading those ideas and principles. These two men could not have complemented each other more perfectly had they set out to do so.

Baha 'U'llah, having reached the age of fifty, proclaimed himself a divine figure with a new revelation for all the world. Baha'i, as his revelation is called, has three million followers and runs establishments in some 350 states and dependencies. As a religion or an ethical grouping in its own right, Baha'i has not set the world on fire in terms of its numerical membership. The principles of Baha 'U'llah's new revelation are quite another story, however; for to say those principles have gained widespread acceptance would be to understate their impact.

Baha 'U'llah taught that revealed religions—indeed, all religions—can be fulfilled only by being transformed into his own larger revelation. Though he never supplied the practical details of the unity he called for, he was clear about its practical consequences. As all religions were fused into one Mega-Religion—a term he never used—there would be a World Government, complete with a World Executive, a World Parliament, a World Police Force, a Universal House of Justice, a World Language, and a World Currency.

When all that was accomplished, there would reign among men what Baha'is like to call the Most Great Peace. For peace among men, which is to be maintained by the Council of Elders, was and remains the ultimate aim.

Any form of patriotism will disappear—a needless thing in the face of peace as a planetary condition. Similarly, all the particular traits of all the various religions having to do with truth and transcendence and salvation and all the rest of it will sink to a secondary level for a while, and will finally vanish—as needless things in the face of brotherhood and unity as planetary conditions.

Baha 'U'llah died in a Turkish prison in 1892. He left no instructions regarding how to effect his transformation. His son, and then his grandson, continued his work. But they gave no such instructions, either. In that regard, it can be said that Swami Vivekenanda was Baha 'U'llah's truest heir; for he did supply precisely the required formula.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Vivekenanda enjoyed some special gift of communication—some charisma, as television stars like to say about one another. The most heady reading of him by his devotees is that he was entrusted with a special mission by the Elders.

For, amazingly, in one summer visit to Chicago in the year following Baha 'U'llah's death, Vivekenanda, a Hindu by heritage, successfully inaugurated the technique by which Mega-Religion—already defined in its essence by Baha 'U'llah—has made such steady progress in the twentieth century.

Invited by the World Congress of Religions as the star attraction of the Parliaments of Religions held in conjunction with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Vivekenanda “dialogued” with all comers—Christians, Jews and Muslims, Shintoists, Jains and Taoists, Zorastrians, Confucians and Buddhists, atheists and Communists.

In tone and in substance, that was the start of a practice we all take for granted today: the interfaith meeting. Vivekenanda's example was infectious; his language, inoffensive; his thought, stimulating. And the overarching message of all three—example, language and thought—was the unity of all mankind, and the harmony that lay in store for us all on the day when, by just such a process as he demonstrated, all true religions would be melded into a higher belief.

Though he died young—in 1902 at the age of thirty-nine—Vivekenanda, by his extraordinary personality and example, provided the how-to action model for the achievement of Baha 'U'llah's vision. That, it was said, had been his mission. And sure enough, within scant years after his life in this “dimension” was over, important organizations began to form, follow his lead and thrive. In region after region of the world, group after star-studded group held congress after international congress, fellowship meeting after interfaith fellowship meeting.

In all of them, the signs and symbols associated with ancient and not so ancient religions were borrowed and displayed in unaccustomed places. Unity was visibly on the march. Yes, it was true that sometimes those symbols were bowdlerized, as was the case with Bertrand Russell's peace symbol—a broken cross turned upside down. But such violence to individual religions was not inconsistent with the aim of sampling for the sake of unity.

Most often, though, such symbols were borrowed with due respect. It
became more and more common to find the Vedanta sign of the Hindus—a serpent coiling among leaves arranged in the shape of a six-pointed star—displayed at Mega-Religionist meetings in Prague, Czechoslovakia, or in Detroit, Michigan. It seems almost natural today to find the Buddhist wheel, with its six spokes representing as many religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism and Christianity—displayed in such places as Mother Teresa's principal house in Calcutta, and in New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Such expressions of universalism were not accepted all at once, of course. Nourishing a vision of world unity and peace takes time. Sinking all religious differences into the unifying ground of material plenty can be hard work. Plenty of humanly guaranteed reason and honesty and liberty doesn't just happen. Nor does plenty of food and shelter. Nor does plenty of all-seeing, all-wise godliness descend upon man overnight; he must be coaxed and nurtured with plenty of patience toward the Mega-Religionist ideal of a global, borderless and plentiful homeland.

On the other hand, things didn't go all that badly. To list even a tiny fraction of the many hundreds of Mega-Religionist groups that confront Pope John Paul as active and humanly powerful organizations is to display a clear and worldwide trend with which he must deal.

Within the decade in which Vivekenanda accomplished his mission of example and departed this “dimension,” the rush to follow his lead was on. The now venerable International New Life Fellowship (INLF) made its first mark in the world in 1906. In 1908, the Universal Religious Alliance (URA) established its claim and its acronym, first in New York. The year 1910 saw similar important contributions to the Mega-Religionist advance by the Union of International Associations (UIA) in Belgium and the Union of East and West (UEW) in London. The World Alliance for International Friendship and Religion (WAIFR—the acronym that might have been designed to have some appeal of its own) and the Church Peace Union (CPU—not much appeal there) each count 1914 as their first hallmark year, in Switzerland and the United States, respectively.

The decade of the twenties saw the entry of more and more Mega-Religionist groups. The League of Neighbors (LN)—1920, United States—had a friendly ring to it. Then there was the International Fellowship (IF—a modest, even tentative ring to that one), 1922, India. International Brotherhood (IB) followed in 1923 in Paris. World Fellowship of Faiths (WFF), 1924, United States again. World Alliance (WA), the same year, Oxford, England. Peace and Brotherhood (PB), 1926, Louvain, Belgium. The Threefold Movement (TTM), also in 1926, New York. World Peace (WP), World Conference for International Peace Through
Religion (WOCIPR) and Order of Great Companions (OGC) all count their importance as groups from the year 1928, Geneva and London. Even a small sample of the plethora of groups that emerged from about the mid-thirties to the opening of the seventies forces one to take account of almost ten more major Mega-Religionist entries. World Congress of Faith (WCF), 1936, London. The Self-Realization Fellowship (TSRF), 1937, Indiana. World Spiritual Council (WSC), 1946, United States. International Committee for Unity and Universality of Cultures (ICUUC), 1955, Rome. World Fellowship of Religions (WFR), 1957, New Delhi. The very impressive Temple of Understanding (TU), 1959, United States. Organization of United Religions (OUR), 1967, Paris, and Spiritual Unity of Nations (SUN), 1970, England, picked up again on the idea of acronyms that might have some appeal. One of the best-known in the dizzying welter of names, the World Conference of Religion for Peace (WCRP), scored its earliest contributions in Kyoto, Japan, 1970.

Because the patrons of the Mega-Religionist groups are the establishment figures of the world, and because such luminaries of world society attract one another as surely as they capture the attention of the general public, it is not surprising to Pope John Paul that such individuals turn up regularly at one another's interfaith celebrations around the globe.

It was accepted as a matter of course, even as early as 1955, that John Foster Dulles would appear at San Francisco's Cow Palace for just such a celebration, all but wreathed about with Hindu and Buddhist symbols as a member of the World Brotherhood. Similarly, no one could have been surprised to see Sir James McCauley, a Buddhist, turn up on the Mediterranean island of Patmos in 1988 as an official delegate of the World Conference of Religion for Peace (WCRP), to help the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople celebrate two thousand years of Christianity.

What John Paul does find disturbing is the degree to which the higher-ranking clergy—cardinals and bishops—throughout his Church organization set an example of Mega-Religionist cooperation for priests and laity alike by joining celebrations that are intentionally neither Roman Catholic nor Christian.

The late John Cardinal Wright, for example, a Vatican figure of some importance, was one of the Founding Fathers of WCRP. Perhaps the Cardinal did not realize what he was getting into when he lent himself to the founding of that organization. Others, however, cannot claim ignorance as a fig leaf.

Surely Terence Cardinal Cooke, the late Archbishop of New York, understood the implications of his hosting a widely publicized meeting
of TU in St. Patrick's Cathedral. To the accompaniment of silver bells and ceremonial horns, and before a gathering of some 5,000 TU devotees—including Roman Catholic, Armenian, Protestant and Jewish clergy—the Cardinal welcomed the Dalai Lama to his side as the fourteenth reincarnation of Bodhisvatta Avalokitesvara, Manifestation of Buddha's Compassion.

“We believers seek common ground,” the Cardinal told the TU glitterati as he took the Dalai Lama's hand. “We make each other welcome in our houses of worship.”

“All the major world religions are the same,” the maroon-robed Dalai Lama corrected His Eminence, and received a standing ovation.

John Paul's concern goes still further. It is one thing—a dangerous thing, perhaps—to lend your Roman Catholic house of worship for the atheist ceremonies of Tibetan Buddhism. But systematic and worldwide cooperation with Mega-Religion carries the matter to an entirely different level. And that is exactly the situation in the case of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace (PCJP).

Already known for its long cooperation with the policies of Antonio Gramsci, the PCJP, in each of its local branches throughout the four thousand dioceses of John Paul's Roman Catholic Church, consistently endorses the main themes of Soviet Marxist policy—the evils of capitalism in Western democracies, the call for unilateral disarmament by the Western powers, the absolute need to establish a one-world economic system based on the distribution of the riches, goods and services of the capitalist world.

That close collaboration of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace with the foreign policy aims of the Soviet Union was institutionalized on the day the Commission cooperated with the World Council of Churches (WCC)—itself an instrument of Soviet policy since 1966—to establish a joint Committee on Society, Development and Peace (SODEPAX) in 1968.