Beset President

Haiti's President Fracc,ois Duvalier is a man with many real troubles. He is beset at home by an opposition that plots and throws bombs constantly; he is beset east and west by the Dominican Republic and Cuba, which keep trying to strike at each other through Haiti. But he has one powerful friend, the U.S., which sent him 50 marines to train his army and has had destroyers around the Windward Passage to discourage seaborne invasion. Last week one of Duvalier's tactical companies crept up on the 30-man invasion force that slipped in from Cuba a fortnight ago (TIME. Aug. 17). In a flurry of gunfire, the troops killed most of the invaders, captured four, sent the rest fleeing wildly.

At this point, just when he should have relaxed, the sick (cardiac disease), suspicious President picked a new fight with a more serious opponent: the Roman Catholic Church. On Duvalier's orders, his tough cops grabbed up Father Etienne Grienenberger. rector of St. Martial, Haiti's largest Catholic college, and Father Joseph Marrec, a small-town pastor, and hustled them roughly onto a New York-bound plane, expelling them from Haiti for "reasons of internal security."

Duvalier had long harbored a resentment against the church, considering it a bastion of the opposition. Most of the priests are white, French-born and close to the mulatto upper classes that strongly oppose Duvalier, a Catholic himself but with close political links to the voodoo priesthood. When 1,000 priests, nuns and churchgoers gathered in Port-au-Prince's Notre Dame Cathedral to protest the expulsion order, Clement Barbot, the President's cold-eyed secretary and secret police chief, led a gang of bullyboys into the cathedral on a wild, baton-swinging charge, arrested 60.

For Archbishop Fracc,ois Poirier, Haiti's highest prelate, who is also French-born and white, this was too much. He notified parish priests up and down the island of the expulsions, followed with a denunciation of the government's action. Duvalier retaliated with a warrant for the archbishop's arrest for violating the 1860 Haiti-Vatican Concordat, which binds priests "to do nothing against the interests of the republic."

Duvalier had overreached himself; as the Vatican hinted at automatic excommunication and Catholic Haiti throbbed with unrest, the President backed off. At week's end the regime announced "the arrest is halted'' but blustered that "the President will not permit anyone to discredit the government."

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