LUIS MUNOZ MARIN, Puerto Rico’s first elected Governor, remains in La Fortaleza. He sits in the Governor’s Palace, confident and pleased, for the jibaros of the mountains and countryside, in overwhelming numbers, have defied their Roman Catholic bishops to elect him to a fourth term. But, while confident and pleased, he also is uneasy. Despite his victory, a threat lingers, perhaps not to his power, but (more important) to the political stability of Puerto Rico. And, while the threat evolves primarily from clericalism, part of the threat also stems from Muñoz Marín himself.

During the campaign, the flare-up over the tactics of the bishops, who issued two pastoral letters forbidding Catholics to vote for Muñoz Marín, obscured some of the political problems of Puerto Rico — the very problems that set the climate for the letters. The Governor’s rout of the new Christian Action Party, a creature of the bishops, tended to fill his supporters, particularly abroad, with a heady optimism, blinding them to the dangers still enveloping democracy on the island.

In recent years, admirers of the sixty-two-year-old Muñoz Marín have fretted over the future of Puerto Rico once he passes from the scene. The Popular Democratic Party has a strangle hold on island politics, and Muñoz Marín has a strangle hold on the Popular Democratic Party. The dynamic, New Dealish Governor, in fact, is the political whole of Puerto Rico. He represents one-man rule by true democratic consent.

Twelve years after he first came to power, public servants still rush about excited with purpose. Without the idols of Trujillo and the screeching nationalism of Castro, Muñoz Marín evokes a sense of vitality and reverence reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt. Under the Governor's care, Puerto Rico has raised its per capita income to the second highest in Latin America, cut its death rate to the point where life expectancy surpasses that of the United States, and instituted projects of community education, land reform and small industry development that have become models for the underdeveloped nations of the world. The program has won such gratitude from the people that Muñoz Marín, a determined democrat, looks on his many one-sided victories with some misgivings.

Puerto Rico lacks two political elements needed to insure future stability: the training of young, vigorous successors to Muñoz Marín, and a meaningful opposition. Before this year’s campaign, a Puerto Rican who approved of the island’s unique commonwealth status, but rejected the Governor’s economic theories, had one poor alternative. He could oppose the Popular Democratic Party only by casting his lot with weak parties that existed solely to cry for independence or statehood.

SOME political analysts often suggest a solution to the dilemma: if Muñoz Marín were to distribute power within the Popular Democratic Party to a few young associates, these men, after succeeding him, might split the party into halves vying intelligently for island leadership. At least on paper, Muñoz Marín moved in that direction last August. He announced a plan for decentralized control over the party apparatus. But his move came after the rise of clericalism. The Christian Action Party already had been launched, giving voters a new alternative. Instead of choosing solely between commonwealth and non-commonwealth status, they now could also choose between Catholicism and Muñiozmarínism.

The Catholic group burst into Puerto Rico’s political line-up last June without warning. It was nourished, however, on the long-standing resentment by Catholic prelates of their lot on the island. While more than 80 per cent of the islanders are nominally Catholic, only 25 per cent practice their religion, and there is a more vital Protestant movement within the country than in most Latin areas. Since the acquisition of the island by the United States, the hierarchy has lost its hold on education; less than 10 per cent of the children attend parochial school.

The priests, mostly natives of the United States, have tended to blame U.S. policy for their problems. They have complained, for example, that Washington almost always appointed Protestant education officials during the years the island was a possession. Brooklyn-born Bishop James McManus of Ponce, the chief force behind the pastoral letters, wrote long before the campaign:

“Puerto Rico is a Catholic people that is the victim of a group of officials who, abusing their power and the public funds, have undertaken to destroy the beliefs of the inhabitants. . . . United States policy has aimed from the beginning to destroy the philosophy and religious traditions of Puerto Rico. For this, it merits no other name than that of the spiritual killer of that nation.”

In the view of Catholic leaders, the situation grew no better when Puerto Rico became a commonwealth and control over domestic affairs passed from the United States to the island itself. Muñoz Marín quietly continued birth control and sterilization programs and cooperation with private researchers on the use of oral contraceptives. In education, he guarded the public schools against any influence by the Church. One of his education policies, in fact, triggered the formation of the Christian Action Party. This was last spring, when he and his Popular Democratic Party opposed a legislative proposal of the Church that would have authorized students to take time off for religious instruction. After the bill failed, an angry Archbishop James P. Davis told a rally of more than 65,000 that Catholics now were free to organize a party. A group of Catholic laymen, supported by Bishop McManus, set to work.

FEW observers expected the new party (its banner is a rosary without a cross) to collect the 70,000 signatures needed to put its candidates on the ballot this year. But equally few observers counted on the intensity of the Church’s support. Leaflets beseeching, “Catholics, help register your party! God before Caesar. The moral law before political convenience,” were distributed in the churches. Bishop McManus told an assembly of lay leaders in the Church of Santa Maria Reina in Ponce that the formation of the Christian Action Party “‘was the logical step forced on Christians who live in a society that is being dechristianized.” He and Archbishop Davis wrote a pastoral letter urging the party’s registration. At first, Bishop McManus said Catholics were not conscience-bound to register the party, but, as priests campaigned from their pulpits, the line between persuasion and injunction grew blurred. In three months, the party collected 82,000 signatures. The San Juan Star called the feat “a major victory and a minor miracle.” “The Catholic Church is no longer on the defensive.” said Archbishop Davis later. “It goes out to meet the foe.”

But the Church moved out too far and, with its sensational pastoral letters, forfeited the victory and the miracle. In their first letter, on October 18, Archbishop Davis, Bishop McManus and Bishop Luis Aponte Martinez focused on a complex theological issue to attack Muñoz Marín. The Popular Democratic Party, disturbed over the clericalism represented by the Christian Action Party, had inserted this paragraph into its 1960 platform:

“The democratic philosophy of our party implies that only those acts which the general consensus of Puerto Ricans considers immoral, such as murder, theft, perjury, etc., can be prohibited with punishment. But it is not licit under the rule of liberty to prohibit with punishment those acts which a respectable part of public opinion does not regard as immoral.”

The Popular Party clearly meant that if a respectable part of the population, such as the Protestant minority or the huge body of non-practicing Catholics, considered birth control moral, the government had no right to prohibit it. But the bishops looked deeply into the philosophy of the paragraph and found heresy there. “It is evident from the quotation,” they said, “that the Popular Party’s philosophy is anti-Christian and anti-Catholic, and that it is based on the modern heresy that the popular will, not divine law, decides what is moral and immoral. This philosophy destroys the Ten Commandments and allows them to be replaced by a human, popular criterion.” Disclaiming any intention to impose Catholic morality on the government, the bishops concluded, “It is certainly our duty to prohibit Catholics to give their votes to a party which, denying Christian morality, accepts the morality of ‘the rule of liberty.’”

Some confusion arose over whether a Catholic could ignore the bishops without committing a sin; but, in their second pastoral letter, four days later, the bishops whisked away the confusion. They declared that any Catholic who voted for Muñoz Marín would commit a sin for disobeying God, the bishops and his own convictions.

THE pastoral Ietters crippled the cause of their authors. Puerto Ricans bristled at what they saw as a threat to their liberty, and Muñoz Marín met the challenge by campaigning harder than he has since his first election. He told his people:

“We cannot permit the error of three wrong bishops to take away our religion, our party and our democracy. I am speaking with pain in me, because if you allow religion into politics, a grave tragedy will happen in Puerto Rico. ...

No one can command you on how to vote. No one — not the bishops, the clergy, nor myself. The right to vote must be free. If one man, or three bishops, can command you how to vote — that will be the end of liberty.”

On November 8, Puerto Ricans proved that no one could command them how to vote. Muñoz Marín received 456,317 votes, 58 per cent of Puerto Rico’s 780,073 ballots. This represented a drop in popularity from 1956, when he had 62 per cent of the vote, but the decrease could be attributed to the natural attrition of support for a leader so long in power and to the growing strength of the Statehood Republican Party. That party’s candidate for governor, Luis Ferré, had 250,638 votes, or 32 per cent of the total, a jump from his party’s 24 per cent four years ago.

The Christian Action Party limped far behind. Its candidate, Dr. Salvador Perea, received 51,072 votes, or 6.5 per cent of the total. This meager output underscored the poor judgment of the bishops, for it was 30,000 fewer than the number of voters who signed petitions to register the party before the pastoral letters were issued. The fourth candidate, Julio Garcia Díaz of the Independence Party, polled 24,047 votes, or 3 per cent of the total. Both the Christian Action Party and the Independence Party, by failing to capture 10 per cent of the total vote, lost their political status and will have to petition as new parties if they want a place on the ballot in 1964.

Despite its humiliating defeat, the Church is unlikely to retire from politics. After the election, Dr. Perea said the Christian Action Party was only beginning: “The house of God,” he said, “never dies.” There have been rumors that the Christian Action Party will merge with the Statehood Republican Party. In past campaigns, Bishop McManus, a friend of Ferré, has backed the Statehood Party and during the 1960 campaign, Ferré embraced the sentiment of the pastoral letters.

The platform of a merged Statehood-Catholic party would read as if the issues facing Puerto Rico involved the commonwealth and the Church and nothing else. This is, of course, absurd — dangerously so. The Statehood Party, allied with the Republicans on the mainland, cries statehood but its real message is a basic opposition to the liberalism of Muñoz Marín. And there is little doubt that the Christian Action Party attracts many Puerto Ricans who disagree with Muñoz Marín on issues much broader than birth control and released time for religious instruction. Should Muñoz Marín leave a weak, leaderless, splintering Popular Democratic Party when he retires, an extremely conservative Statehood-Catholic Party could emerge as the country’s dominant political power.

A troubled Muñoz Marín has tried to prevent this eventuality. Last August, he announced certain internal party reforms. A “presidential committee” of seven, instead of a single leader, now runs the Popular Democratic Party. This committee, which has a rotating chairman, is selected periodically by a large central council of party leaders, legislators and members of the Popular Youth movement. It is not quite certain now how this structure will operate in the future. For the present, with Muñoz Marín as a member of the committee, there is no doubt that the party continues to be his. “The fact is,” A. W. Maldonado of the San Juan Star has written, “that Muñoz will continue to lead the party — no matter what his title. ... Although pushes and pulls for control of the party increase as the leader gets older, all members will continue to consider their leader, as long as he lives, as — in their words — ‘a great man of the Americas.’”

Puerto Rico sorely needs an opposition to engage Muñoz Marín’s ruling party in an intelligent dialogue on the real problems of the island.

Earl Parker Hanson wrote in Puerto Rico: Land of Wonders (1960):

“In the troublesome dichotomy between more jobs and greater efficiency, between more employment and higher wages for fewer workers, between wider distribution of the land and its more efficient use, lies the great problem of modern Puerto Rico. ...

The time may come when a rising political leader wants to give a stevedore the chance to cast a vote against the Popular Democratic Party, in protest over the modernization of seaports, without also apparently voting for either statehood or independence, neither of which he may want.”

If the reforms of Muñoz Marín work, such an opposition will emerge from the Popular Democratic Party itself. But the Christian Action Party, even merged with the Statehood Republican Party, would be of little use to Puerto Rico. Besides endangering democracy on an island living under the American Constitution’s principle of separation of church and state, the Church-sponsored party troubled the voter this year with the false issue of anti-Catholicism, diverting his attention from the real problems of his country. A democracy must have better service from its parties.

STANLEY MEISLER, a Washington, D.C. newspaper man, recently visited Puerto Rico.