When Pope John Paul II slipped in his bathtub on the evening of April 28, he fractured more than his right thighbone. The papal itinerary for the next several months was also pretty well shattered, and before it can be rescheduled many disappointed people will be obliged to revise their own travel plans.

From 1977 onward a significant number--perhaps 30,000--Episcopalians left the Episcopal Church/U.S.A. because it had begun to ordain women as priests; had changed or was changing radically on a variety of sexual-ethical issues, for instance, on abortion and on the indissolubility of Christian marriage, and had altered The Book of Common Prayer (B.C.P.) in ways that the departers perceived as falsifying certain Christian doctrines.

Graham Greene's The Comedians is surely the most famous novel set in contemporary Haiti. The book, published in 1965, introduced the English-speaking world to the methods of governance of président-a-vie Francois Duvalier. Following the novel's publication, both Greene and his book were banned in Haiti. Papa Doc was furious with the expose, certainly, but he was also vexed by the ethnographic detail of the novel. Trained as an anthropologist, the dictator knew that careful observers like Greene are always more difficult to discredit. Duvalier did his best, however, going so far as to produce a glossy bilingual pamphlet, Graham Greene Demasque, which depicted the writer as "unbalanced, sadistic, perverted ... the shame of proud and noble England." Although Greene would later term this assessment "the greatest honor I've yet received," Duvalier was not joking. The Comedians, travelers to Haiti were warned, was a book that even the luggage-rifling thugs at the airport could recognize.

On Feb. 7, 1991 the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide became Haiti's first democratically elected President in 200 years, after receiving 70 percent of the popular vote. Elements of the Army have now deposed Father Aristide as we go to press, which makes the following conversation a sad one. The interview, in English, was taped by the Most Rev. Emerson J. Moore, Auxiliary Bishop of New York, who visited Port-au-Prince last month for Catholic Relief Services. These are excerpts: 

You are faced with enormous expectations from the Haitian people. Will you be able to meet them?  

The thing is, we are now the subjects of our own history. So we are not waiting for help to come from another country without doing something to change the situation ourselves. Because we no longer accept a small group's exploiting the majority, it's possible to hope for good cooperation from abroad. When that help arrives, we can share it with the majority: the opposite of what we had in the past. So we can hope for a new country, where day by day, without just waiting for help, we'll do better.  

A recent New York Times story indicated you have a good working relationship with the U. S. Ambassador in Haiti. Do you agree that the relationship with the  U. S. Government is a good one?  

I agree that it's good. First, there's mutual respect. I think in the past it wasn't easy for the States to respect Haiti, because our governments couldn't demand this respect when they were involved in corruption. Since Feb. 7, we have been cleaning things up, and we want to stay clean, fighting against any kind of corruption or dictatorship. Haiti is playing a historical role in the world. Here in Haiti, for the first time, we were able to change the political situation before changing the social situation, and without weapons-which is a beautiful lesson for the world. I hope the United States will continue to respect our will, our people, our dignity, just as we respect them.  

From a theological point of view, we are giving a biblical lesson, which we share with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Not because we want to say we are better than they-no-but just because God continues to do in Haiti what it pleases Him to do with Israel in the Bible and with poor people.  

We African-Americans still have to deal with racism daily, and your election is an example of hope for all of us. What message would you offer us?

One theologian I know of has written a beautiful book in which he says, "God is black." His point is that, when the Egyptians were killing God's people, God was in Moses and with the Jews, to fight against Pharaoh. God took the part of the little people. In the past in the United States, where black people were exploited by white people, God became black because He is always with the little people, with the poor.  

Today I think what is going on in Haiti is the same story, the story of God. Here you have the poorest country, and God passes among us to say, "I am with you as Haitians, and so I am God and I am Haitian." With solidarity here in Haiti we can do a lot. Day by day we are building solidarity, becoming stronger and stronger. We will not say that we are superior to white people. No, we will say we are all brothers, and we will not accept oppression from them. When we give this answer, I think we continue the story of God. When we can build a bridge between black and white, we become children of God, the God who is at the same time white and black.   

Do you feel that your role as President conforms to your vision of the priesthood?  

I would not say I am Moses. No. But I can say our people are putting into practice the will of God, building solidarity, and in so doing they have chosen one of us to play, this role of President who is a priest. To become a priest is to become one of those who serve their brothers and sisters. That's what Christ did. In becoming President we just continue to serve, and in serving people one can not forget the poor. The whole Bible shows how God is always close to poor people. If someone is sick, Jesus visits that person, and if in prison, the same. All that Jesus did is a lesson for us, so that we might try to do the same. And I think that here in Haiti if, after all these years, we have a priest as President, it's not just because this priest wanted to become President. No. It's because God wanted us to do a special service for His people.  

I've said I don't think I am Moses. But I am sure God is doing something for His people, and I have to do my job as the servant of God. For instance, we want a literacy program, because we have 85 percent of the population who do not know how to write their name. For us it way to put into practice that beautiful Gospel passage where we see God, in Jesus, leaving the 99 sheep to go to look for the one. Here in Haiti, those 99 are the majority who did not have the chance to go to school. If we have 15 percent who got the chance-among them, Catholic priests, sisters, brothers-so now in the name of Jesus we go to look for those 85 percent.  

As President, I will govern with the Constitution, not the Bible. But as a Christian, I also have the Bible in my hand, to read it and to learn from God how to be at the same time priest and President.  

Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Popes representative in Washington, D.C., has recently been appointed head of the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education (for Seminaries and Educational Institutions). Archbishop Laghi is leaving behind a hierarchy that he helped remake under the direction of John Paul II. As the Popes representative to the US. church he was intimately involved in the appointment of bishops (see "The Selection of Bishops," AM., Aug. 18, 1984). His legacy to the U S. church includes the bishops appointed during his tenure, some of whom will serve into the 21st century.

I am not sure whether a discussion of the serious implications of the Madonna rock music video "Like a Prayer" is possible in the contemporary climate of discourse in American Catholicism. Nonetheless, I propose to try. I will discuss the religious theme of "Like a Prayer," Madonna's critique of her religious heritage and the more general issue of the relationship between sexuality and religious imagination.

Some preliminary comments about the audio and video tapes of "Like a Prayer":

1 ) Virtually all the rock music critics agree that technically the music and singing of "Like a Prayer" are the best that Madonna has ever done. Rolling Stone says that it is "as close to art as pop music gets... proof not only that Madonna should be taken seriously as an artist but that hers is one of the most compelling voices of the eighties."

2) The lyrics of the album run from harmless to devout. In the title song, God's voice calls the singer's name, and it feels like home. That "Like a Prayer" is in fact a prayer is evident from the lyrics themselves, from the singer's interpretation of them, and from the critical reaction. In the words of Edna Gundersen in USA Today, "Lyrically 'Prayer' is a confessional feast, with Madonna's Catholic upbringing as the main course. Songs are rife with religious overtones, spiritual and hymnal arrangements and a host of references to joy, faith, sin and power."

The Arizona Daily Star notes that "it is largely a story of renewal and self-determination and it speaks with authority. You can dance, if you want to, but this time there's a heart and a brain behind the beat."

Only those who come to the music and lyrics with a grim determination to find prurience and blasphemy can miss—and then with considerable effort—the God hunger that animates them.

3) The music video is utterly harmless, a PG-13 at the worst, and, by the standards of rock video, charming and chaste. More than that, it is patently a morality play. In the singer's own words it is "a song of a passionate young girl so in love with God that it is almost as though He were the male figure in her life."

The girl in the story witnesses a crime; she sees a black man falsely accused of it; she flees from the criminals and hides in a church; she prays to a black saint (Martin de Porres, one presumes) and falls asleep. She dreams that the saint comes alive and represents God as her lover. She awakens from the dream and realizes that in the power of God's love she can run the risk of doing right. In Madonna's words, "She knows that nothing's going to happen to her if she does what she believes is right." She goes to the police station and obtains the release of the innocent man.

To emphasize the religious themes of the album, it comes steeped in the smell of sandalwood, recalling the church incense of the past and implicitly (if unintentionall) the sandalwood themes of The Song of Songs.

That this is the meaning of the video is clear from its obvious sense, from the testimony of the singer and from the virtually unanimous reaction of the young people who have watched it. (In my sociology of religion class of 150 students, before any comment from me, 30 percent rated the video "PG." 68 percent rated it "PG-13," and 2 percent rated it "R" or "X.")

This is blasphemy? Only for the prurient and the sick who come to the video determined to read their own twisted sexual hang-ups into it. Only for those who think that it is blasphemous to use religious imagery in popular music. Only for those who think that sexual passion is an inappropriate metaphor for divine passion (and thus are pretty hard on Hosea, Jesus, St. Paul, St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Teresa of Avila). Only for those whose subconscious racism is offended at the image of a black saint revealing God's love.

The line between blasphemy (the abuse of the divine) and sacramentality (the search for the Creator in the created) may sometimes be thin. One person's blasphemy may be another person's sacramentality—a May crowning is blasphemous for a fundamentalist and sacramental for a Catholic. Fundamentalists may well believe that the use of sexual passion as a metaphor for God's passion, especially in a work of popular art, is blasphemous. Catholics, dedicated as they are to a search for the Creator in creation, can hardly think so.

Even the most ridig fundamentalist or Catholic Jansenist must search desperately to fmd prurience in "Like a Prayer." Madonna's low-cut dress (or slip)? The tender kiss of the (black) saint (God)? The brief image of sensual satisfaction on the face of the woman in the dream as she's caught up in God's love? These would be an "occasion of sin" for young people?

Someone has to be kidding!

An immensely popular, and now critically acclaimed, singer tells a morality story filled with Catholic imagery, and some Christians respond to it with threats of boycotts against Pepsi-Cola (for whom she has made ads and which has lost $5 million because of its cancellation of the ads). Such a response tells more about those who respond than it does about the work of art itself.

In her interviews about "Like a Prayer" and previous songs. Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone has repeatedly described the importance of Catholicism in her childhood and the remnants of Catholic guilt that continue to haunt her life: "If you enjoy something, it must be wrong." In the rock video when the girl grabs a knife and cuts herself, causing stigmata-like wounds on her hands, the wounds represent guilt, Madonna tells us. However, it is not guilt but love that leads the girl to do what she knows is right. Madonna seems to be saying that the guilt that obsessed her Catholic childhood is not enough to produce virtue.

She has been less explicit about the love imagery and the sense of sacramentality she has also carried with her from her Catholic childhood. Perhaps she is unaware of this second part of her inheritance. Nonetheless it permeates her work. She says she is not sure whether she is a Catholic or whether she would raise a child as Catholic. That is her own personal problem. In fact she sings "like a Catholic" (especially in "Like a Prayer"), and for our purposes in this article that is what counts.

Perceive the paradox: Catholicism in its present formulation passes on to its children both obsessive and imprisoning guilt and a liberating sense of God's love as sacramentalized tn creation and especially in human love. It is a paradox struggling to become a contradiction.

Anyone who listens to the laity knows how bitter are the revulsions of many against their guilt-dominated Catholic childhood and how many of them claim, like Madonna, that they were taught to believe that anything one enjoys must be wrong. Not all Catholics were educated this way; but if we are honest, we must admit that guilt and anger about guilt is widespread among Catholics. That most of them cling to their Catholicism (like Madonna) one way or another is evidence that the appeal of Catholic imagery is stronger than the ugliness of Catholic guilt.

Guilt is the central theme of contemporary Catholicism; the sacramental imagination is transmitted (in 15 countries that fellow sociologist Michael Hout and I have studied recently) either unintentionally or with the sense that, compared to guilt, it is unimportant. Christian leadership often concentrates on what is peripheral and the result of accidental historical circumstances and ignores what is essential and timeless. And organizes boycotts against those who sometimes have a better sense of the sacramental—the lurking presence of God—than they do.

In my sociology of religion class, the division of reaction to "Like a Prayer" was between fundamentalist Protestants, who were uneasy about the "shock" of the juxtaposition of womanly eroticism and the sacred, and Catholics, who were not disturbed by the blending of the two. "Catholics are more sensual," commented a mainline Protestant student. Surely the sacramental imagination ought to make them so; if they are in this era, however, the reason is that they are able to resist the Jansenism that still perdures.

In the present climate within the Catholic Church, the Irish monks would not have dared to convert an Indo-European intercourse symbol into the Celtic cross representing Jesus and Mary and the union of male and female in God. If she wanted to keep clergy and hierarchy happy, St. Teresa would not have dared use the powerful erotic imagery of her mystical writings, nor would St. Bernard have dared to write his commentary on the "Song of Songs" the way he did.

The builders of Romanesque churches would not have (as my colleague at the University of Arizona, Donna Swaim, has told me) used pagan fertility symbols on their altars as signs of vitality to ward off morbidity Fourth-century Roman liturgists would not have incorporated into the Easter Vigil service a pagan fertility ritual that used a candle and water.

Madonna must be denounced and Pepsi-Cola threatened with boycott because she is a sexually attractive woman who dares to link her sexuality with God and re- ligious images; That, gentle per- sons, is the heart ofthe matter.

The link between vitaiity and fertility between life and sex, has been so obvious that, until the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, humankind had no doubts about the pervasive religious imagery of sex and the pervasive sexual imagery of religion. The Irish until the last century used to make love in the fields outside the house where a wake was in process to defy death: Life, continued by sexual union—they told death—is stronger than you are.

It is no accident that Jesus rose from the dead at the time of the Jewish spring fertility festival.

Too often our contemporary Catholic leadership rejects this human experience out of hand. Sex may be necessary for the continuation of the species, but please, lay folk, don't talk about it, don't let its influence seep into your life outside of your bedrooms, don't enjoy it too much, don't let it into your artistic works (especially if they happen to be religious) and don't suggest that the allure of a woman's body in a rock video staged in church can hint at the allure of God.

The novelist Bruce Marshal observed four decades ago that Jansenism is the odd notion that God made an artistic mistake in ordaining the mechanics of human procreation.

The matter is not subject for discussion, as I have learned to my dismay. History, theology, art, archeology, exege- sis—all are simply dismissed as irrelevant when they challenge the deep-seated antipathy toward sexuality that permeates Catholic leadership elites. The laity will be shocked, they tell you, refusing to listen to any other idea. In fact,

Occasionally, people ask me questions as if I’d become the Carl Sagan of the adolescent universe. I grant that 22 years of reading 40 reflection papers from each of what now amounts to about 3,500 high-school and college students has given me perhaps a better insight into what teen-agers think than, say, a first-time parent--and surely better than the teenager, but I still have more than a few reminders of my finitude and fallibility. One of them arrived in the mail last Friday, from a group of high-school principals, asking me to give a workshop on teen-age spirituality next winter in Thcson, Ariz.