ABROAD

WARSAW This Enemy The Roman Catholic Church of Poland is deeply disturbed by the refusal of the Communist government to respect agreements made during the social and political upheaval of the Solidarity movement two years ago. An agreement guaranteeing freedom of religion, in return for a reciprocal acknowledgment of the rights of the socialist state, has never been officially promulgated. Two-thirds of a draft of the agreement was at one point accepted by the state authorities; now even that has been withdrawn. Another cause of tension is the project for an agricultural foundation supervised by the Church and supported by private funds from the West. There is no question about the poverty of rural infrastructures in Poland (there are very few telephones and hardly any village water systems; only a quarter of the roads are paved). The law creating the foundation was passed by the Diet in April 1984, but so far the government has refused to authorize it, costing the foundation $18 million in forfeited gifts. Still another grievance concerns the ecclesiastical press. In a country that is 98 per cent Catholic, only 33 periodicals of a total of 2,766 are Church-connected. Another broken promise: that school textbooks would be revised toward greater respect for spiritual belief and away from propaganda for atheism. “In our system,” said the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Glemp, in a recent sermon, “there is a fixed idea that there must be a class enemy, and where there is no class enemy, any other enemy will do. . . . [Today] the enemy is the Church.”

PARIS Carrier Momentum The Defense Ministry has decided to build a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to maintain the credibility of France’s military power. The vessel, bearing the illustrious name of Richelieu, will take its place with the fleet in ten years. Construction will require 12 million man-hours (there is as yet no monetary estimate). The ability to intervene from a base that has no territorial, and little diplomatic, restriction is an immense advantage in creating “a common frontier” with almost any adversary, say French naval spokesmen. The common-frontier theory rests on the fact that two-thirds of the world’s population, and therefore industry, is concentrated within 250 miles of the sea, and thus within range of the carrier’s aircraft. The navy’s present carrier, the Clemenceau, is due to go out of service in 1992. This would leave a four-year gap before the Richelieu’s commissioning.

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WARSAW This Enemy The Roman Catholic Church of Poland is deeply disturbed by the refusal of the Communist government to respect agreements made during the social and political upheaval of the Solidarity movement two years ago. An agreement guaranteeing freedom of religion, in return for a reciprocal acknowledgment of the rights of the socialist state, has never been officially promulgated. Two-thirds of a draft of the agreement was at one point accepted by the state authorities; now even that has been withdrawn. Another cause of tension is the project for an agricultural foundation supervised by the Church and supported by private funds from the West. There is no question about the poverty of rural infrastructures in Poland (there are very few telephones and hardly any village water systems; only a quarter of the roads are paved). The law creating the foundation was passed by the Diet in April 1984, but so far the government has refused to authorize it, costing the foundation $18 million in forfeited gifts. Still another grievance concerns the ecclesiastical press. In a country that is 98 per cent Catholic, only 33 periodicals of a total of 2,766 are Church-connected. Another broken promise: that school textbooks would be revised toward greater respect for spiritual belief and away from propaganda for atheism. “In our system,” said the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Glemp, in a recent sermon, “there is a fixed idea that there must be a class enemy, and where there is no class enemy, any other enemy will do. . . . [Today] the enemy is the Church.”

PARIS Carrier Momentum The Defense Ministry has decided to build a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to maintain the credibility of France’s military power. The vessel, bearing the illustrious name of Richelieu, will take its place with the fleet in ten years. Construction will require 12 million man-hours (there is as yet no monetary estimate). The ability to intervene from a base that has no territorial, and little diplomatic, restriction is an immense advantage in creating “a common frontier” with almost any adversary, say French naval spokesmen. The common-frontier theory rests on the fact that two-thirds of the world’s population, and therefore industry, is concentrated within 250 miles of the sea, and thus within range of the carrier’s aircraft. The navy’s present carrier, the Clemenceau, is due to go out of service in 1992. This would leave a four-year gap before the Richelieu’s commissioning.