CIIR replies to Patrick Wall's attack MR PATRICK WALL, in

your issue of July 8, produced a litany of abuse of the Catholic Institute for International Relations. It was a mixture of false facts, unjustified inferences and grotesque innuendoes.
But at the end of it we were left with a single, serious, specific question: should the National Catholic Fund continue to give financial support to a body with whose writings and other activities Mr Wall does not agree?
First, the factual errors. Mr Wall calls CIIR a "semi-official" body. He implies that its statements are made "with the authority of the Church in this country". This betrays a serious misunderstanding.
CUR is not by even the smallest fraction an official body. Nor has it ever dreamt of claiming to speak for the Church. It therefore does not need to stamp its publications with the kind of dis
claimer Mr Wall suggests.
What he proposed — merely because CIIR has the "Catholic' in its name — smacked of nothing so much as the Government health warning on cigarette packets: "This publication is unauthorised and may be
dangerous to your health/faith/mind". I cannot believe that many CUR subscribers, or others, are under the same delusion as Mr Wall.
Next, the inferences and innuendoes. Three phrases sum up Mr Wall's characterisation of CHR. He says it appears to "glory in the most radical forms of political dispute", that it is in "partnership with the radical Left", and that it takes "a persistently Left-wing approach on political affairs.
This accusation is supported by a few selective quotations from some of CIIR's publications, but rather more by reference to what CIIR has failed to publish.
At no point is Mr Wall able to challenge facts which CUR has published: which, from so assiduous a critic, we can only find reassuring. What CIIR is evidently guilty of is the error of omission.
Our greatest omission, according to Mr Wall, is our failure to write about the denial of human rights in the USSR. Pervading his extensive discussion of this is a strange insinuation.
It is that CIIR's "deafening silence" on human rights in the Soviet Union springs from an indifference to them — even, one might imagine, from some perverted sympathy with the Soviet Government such as would he consistent only with Mr Wall's view of CIIR as a "radical Left" organisation.
This is an outrageous smear, and Mr Wall must know it. I will not even dignify it with a denial, but will briefly explain, instead, how CIIR goes about its work and makes its choices of the issues on which it may have a contribution to make.
This has nothing to do with a Right-wing or Left wing bias, but everything to do with the institute's own expertise, acquired throughout a long-standing "volunteer" programme as well as its educational work, and particularly with the links it has established with Catholic leaders in the parts of the world of which it has most knowledge.
Other bodies have different special interests. Persecution in Eastern Europe is very capably
publicised by the Rev Michael Bordeaux's Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism.
We share (if it is not presumptuous to say so) Mr Wall's admiration of Mr Bourdeaux's work — work, incidentally, which is lavishly publicised and beside which CIIR's "publicity machine", as Mr Wall frighteningly calls it, is a mere horse and cart.
We wish Mr Bordeaux well; and we do not stigmatise him as "Right-wing" merely because Soviet despotism is his field of interest, or because he sensibly neglects to tread into other fields of injustice. These matters surely transcend conventional political labels.
So it is with CIIR's work, which is concentrated mainly in Latin America and southern Africa, the development problems they manifest and, particularly, the British connection which is historically theirs.
Mr Wall cites Rhodesia, Brazil and Chile as particularly vile examples of CIIR's prejudice. But the fact is that in all these countries, and others as well, CIIR's perspective has been defined essentially by the experience and the message of representative Church leaders who live and work there — Bishop Lamont in Rhodesia, Bishop Helder Camara in Brazil and Cardinal Silva in Chile.
In each of these countries, it is true, the impulse of CHR's work has been to side with the oppres
sed against their oppressors. This has reflected, among other things, the posture of local bishops.
It also accords with the spirit of the 1971 Synod, whose his toric statement forms the text for all Cathodic work in the field of justice and peace. The Synod bore witness to a renewal of the Church's mission to the poor and its identification with the needs of the underprivileged masses.
CUR, in common with perhaps the majority of Catholics throughout the world, is inspired by this leadership and by the Vatican Council before it.
In Mr Wall's world this may make CHR Left-wing.
If that is so, it makes an awful lot of princes of the Church Left-wing as well, not to mention a large body within Mr Wall's own Conservative Party — which, on Rhodesia at least, officially adopts a position much closer to CI1R's general stance than to Mr Wall's.
I hope, however, that these moral sympathies which CUR is not afraid to proclaim do not affect the balance and accuracy of our statements.
I maintain that a fair and thorough reading of them — rather than the selective quotation game Mr Wall plays — would find that they pass that test, although they are doubtless imperfect and, naturally, they vary in quality. I feel sure that the National Catholic Fund, taking. _a more tolerant view than Mr Wall, understands quite well that there is a proper place among its benefactions for support for an independent body like CUR.
Unlike Mr Wall, the fund has never been dogmatic or authoritarian in its judgments. But if there are any waverers, perhaps they should consult the real "radical Left", which would certainly despise CIIR as a moderate, reformist and ineffectual body, committed to a hopelessly unrevolutionary view of the world.
Hugo Young